The Wildfire Season (13 page)

‘I wouldn’t know what you care about, Ruby,’ he says instead.

Miles looks out at what Ruby looks out at every day, and suddenly wants to leave. Not that he has a place in mind to go to. It’s that, from up here, the rolling expanse of green makes him claustrophobic. So still and commanding, he can feel the time passing within him, the accelerated massing of age growing like fat around his heart.

‘And how are
you?
’ Ruby asks with visible effort.

‘Just fine.’

‘You don’t look it.’

‘No? Well, I guess I haven’t looked fine for a while now,’ Miles says, absently cranking the Osborne Fire Finder next to him. ‘I just need a fire.’

‘It’s on the way,’ Ruby promises, her voice already retreating back into her own thoughts, her book, the breakthrough she is willing herself to believe. ‘Don’t you worry about it, Chief. I’ll send a good fire your way real soon.’

Miles makes his way back to his truck and tries to close his ears to the chattering trees. Poplar leaves brush together to form words in a language he can’t understand but once could, a secret childhood code he has grown out of. He catches the gist all the same. The trees are judging him.

As he walks, he hears the distinct thump of human footfall behind him. He swings around to see who’s there. Nothing. Before he continues on he spits, hoping to rid his mouth of the name he feels on the edge of speaking aloud.

He works to turn his mind to something else and comes up with his crew. Even out here, not an hour passes without Miles thinking about them. More and more they arrive in the form of a horrific vision, as four grinning corpses bolting up from shallow graves of ash. Other times he is visited only by their faces, enlarged on the screen of his closed eyelids, winking and whispering, sharing their knowledge of a crime he’d so far gotten away with. Yet when he tried to remember exactly what it was that he’d done, it slipped away, returning to the shadows like a fish that’s caught sight of a glinting hook.

When he arrived as Ross River fire chief five years ago, his crew had every reason not to welcome him. White, first time in the Territory, parachuted in by the government pencil necks in Whitehorse. And he wasn’t the friendliest guy they’d ever met, either. That nasty scar was the least of it. A distance they first read as arrogance, then contempt. Mungo alone made an effort, inviting Miles to join their table in the lounge, climbing up to the roof of his cabin armed with a hammer and a case of beer to help him repair a hole where the ice had pried up the shingles. In return, Miles had given them what he could. Not
the openness that was beyond him but his loyalty.

If he had the authority to sign their cheques until each of their retirement days, he would. Miles is responsible for his crew’s training and safety, but not their contracts. No amount of reminding himself of this saves him from the plain fact that some if not all of them will be without jobs next year if there isn’t a fire to write up within the next couple of weeks. The government funding that is awarded to regional attack teams depends solely on how many smokers a particular crew had to chase. There was some forgiveness for ‘wet summers,’ but not a lot. Last year had already been a quiet one for Ross River. Time’s up.

A pink slip wouldn’t matter much to King. He was from Outside, on his way to a university degree, free of the attachments of skin or history. King wanted a fire as much as anyone, probably more. But if he was like the others of his kind Miles has worked with, he wanted it for the experience, the c.v. padding, the rush. Jerry, Crookedhead and Mungo, on the other hand, needed a fire to hold aloft their respective hopes for an almost-new truck, the return of a lost family, the survival of a cashstrapped community. If these positions dried up, there would be no transfers. Not for these guys, who clung to just the sort of term-contracts the budget cutters would love to see the end of.

Miles’s situation is no better. If they closed down the Ross River team, he doubts that anywhere else would have him. There was the
kid’s death to darken his resumé. Worse, probably, are the rumours.

Drinks too much, I hear. And he’s got a fuse so short you only have to look at him for it to go off. Knows fire, all right. But between you and me, he’s a bad-luck kind of guy. Remember the Dragon’s Back a few years ago?

It was for reasons like these that crewmen sometimes started their own fires. It didn’t happen all the time, but it happened. Miles could only guess at the total number of smokers he’d cut line around that had been lit by a squirt of kerosene and a dropped match. Even within fire teams, off season or on, sober or drunk, arson was not a topic for open conversation. It went without saying that, caught once, you would never work in fire again. But there were also penalties that went well beyond having to find a new job. Fines. A criminal record. Prison time. Sometimes worse. Sometimes, people burned.

Despite this, no matter how severe the threat of discovery, crews will continue to set fires for as long as they are paid to fight them. There is overtime to claim, child support payments to catch up on, bottles to empty. The fire need not be anything serious, just enough to make the guys carry out the gear and put it to a day’s work. A few hours spent lightening the load of the pisstank on your back could justify a new contract for a full year’s salary.

There is another kind of firestarter, spoken of even less than the ones who do it for money. Years
ago, Miles had worked with a guy in B.C.—Brad, he thinks his name was—who, the following season, was sentenced to nine years for starting what grew into a thousand-acre wildfire. Eight of those nine years were the result of his conviction not for arson, but manslaughter. On the last day before the fire was rained into submission, it had taken a crazed turn toward town that swept away a dozen homes, along with the lives of three crew members, trapped in a root cellar they had baked to death in.

Based on Miles’s recollection of the guy—the silence he’d fall into staring into the camp barbecue, the awestruck surveying of even the smallest smouldering snag—Brad started fires for a satisfaction that had nothing to do with paycheques. By Miles’s estimation, of the burns ignited by firefighters, ninetenths are motivated by money, and the rest by the pleasure in seeing the forest lit up like a giant birthday cake with your name on it.

When Miles reaches his truck he jumps into the cab and closes the door behind him as though he’s being followed. After driving cautiously along the rutted access road for half an hour, he manages to push most thoughts of contracts and firestarters out of his mind. As a distraction, he allows himself to stop the truck to play one of his favourite games. Rolls the window down and lays on the horn. He laughs at the pathetic complaint that travels no farther than the first tangle of fallen trunks. But the laughter fails to bring him around,
the sound coming up from inside him empty as the sound of the horn in the truck’s interior.

More than anything, Miles feels awake. Everything around him overly alive to his senses, the volume cranked, colours bleeding. Even the dust suspended in the sunlit air of the cab crowds his vision. The thousands of square miles outside are no better. All the space he previously assumed to be limitless now appears two-dimensional, a shoddy stage backdrop.

It’s at least six hours before sunset, but as he drives on into denser forest, what light makes its way through the branches above is only enough to create a dusky murk of shadows. Miles turns on his headlights for the first time in three weeks. The two cones of light excite the cloud of midges warming themselves over the hood. He flicks on the high beams, but it only brings the corner ahead of him into abrupt focus, the creeping brown veins that reach across the trail. Sound can’t penetrate it. Light won’t hold it back.

The truck comes into a turn and Miles gears down, slapping the wheel. He makes it, then feels his rear wheels sink into a soft rut. Kicks it into reverse. The engine cries at his stomped foot.

He lurches back, then forward so fast that mud sprayed up by the front tires slaps the windshield on its way down. Out, but now he’s blind. He flips the wipers on and keeps gunning, preferring to risk being bumped by a tree to getting stuck again.

It takes three swipes of the blades for the glass to be cleared. And when it is, he sees a figure standing in the road ahead.

Miles drives straight at it. There may still be time to stop before hitting whoever is there, but he keeps his foot down.

With another blink, he recognizes who it is.

The kid’s wearing the same fluorescent vest and green coveralls he wore on the Dragon’s Back. Now, though, much of this has been burned away, so that he is a scarecrow patchwork of nylon and charred flesh. At the sight of Miles bearing down on him, the kid raises both his arms in an appeal for him to stop. His mouth opens—to call out, to take an overdue breath—and keeps opening, until his jaw hangs flat, a black plate against his throat.

For the first time, Miles considers stopping. A human figure stands in the road ahead, asking for help. By reflex, his foot drifts over the brake.

But comes down on the gas.

The truck finds drier earth and accelerates into the twenty-yard straightaway between it and the kid. Miles expects that, as he gets closer, the figure will disappear according to the normal means of ghostly departure, a blink-and-he’s-gone or puff of smoke. Instead, he only comes into greater focus, his waving more furious.

The kid isn’t there. But Miles can’t stop himself from shutting his eyes.

There’s a thump when he hits him. It’s only one of the thousand rocks that fly up against the
undercarriage on a road like this, but it comes at the same moment the front grille would have mown the kid down.

And keeps coming. The truck drifts on for a second or two and Miles can feel something being dragged along with it. Limbs caught in the axle. A pair of fists pounding against his muffler.

He skids to a stop and opens his eyes. For a time, he stares ahead and wonders if this is what losing your mind feels like. Embarrassing, more than anything. A slow slide into new and more foolish situations that cannot be avoided.

Miles checks the rear-view to see if the kid’s body lies in the road. Nothing but fresh tire tracks bathed red in the glow of his brakelights.

‘You should’ve remembered,’ Miles says aloud. ‘I never pick up hitchhikers.’

He knew that seeing Alex and the girl would have its side effects. That the kid would be one of them is something of a curve-ball, but as far as he knows, this may well be the nature of shock, of grief. It likes to take you by surprise.

Miles drives on. The road here is no smoother than a dried-out river bottom, but he jolts along faster than he should. Twice, black stars cloud his vision from his head slamming against the cab’s ceiling. His foot only pushes deeper. He’s not sure where he’s going, but for the first time in what feels like forever, there’s somewhere he has to be.

After breakfast, the hunters lift their packs and head out along the Trench’s north-facing slope. There is something of a trail for the first halfhour, but Margot steers them off it, crossing first a squishy meadow, soaked by one of the hit-andrun showers of the last few days, before taking them into an endless stand of birches, the white trunks so close it tickles the backs of their eyes to look at them.

Margot walks in front, far slower than she’s used to. She has to wait for Bader, followed by Tom and Elsie, and Wade in the rear, head down. There are frequent stops for Margot to consult her compass and pretend to study the ground for tracks, although she knows exactly where they are and that they will not yet find what they are looking for. The pauses are for Jackson Bader’s benefit alone. Stooped over with his hands resting on his knees, a string of curses rising out of him like bubbles.

‘Which way do we go to find the grizzlies?’
Elsie Bader asks lightly as they enter the birches, as though inquiring after the location of the ladies’ shoe section.

‘First, we go to where they like to go,’ Margot says, falling back so that if the old woman insists on talking, neither of them will have to shout. ‘Then we try to find their tracks. But we have to be very quiet.’

‘Oh, of
course.
Quiet as Tom.’

‘Even quieter.’

‘Well,
I
certainly will be.’

‘It might be too late.’

‘Sorry?’

‘They could be listening already.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The big bears, the ones we’re after—they hunt us as much as we hunt them. I’ve seen some terrible things.’

‘Isn’t that something?’

Margot decides to terrify the woman. In the name of ensuring her silence, Margot tells Mrs Bader true stories about what bears can do when they put a mind to it. She starts with how when they attack, they rip your jaw out with their teeth, so that you lose the ability to bite them back. Sometimes, they drag unfinished kills to another location and bury them alive, to be returned to later. Even bringing one down with the advantage of a clear shot can be a flawed business. A gut-shot grizzly will run off and dig a hole in the ground. When you come to finish it, it jumps out of its hiding place and
dedicates the last of its life to chewing through your legs, so that it might enjoy the consolation of watching you bleed to death next to him. Hit them in the hip and they walk on their front legs like a man doing a handstand. Hit them in the heart and they howl.

‘Let’s just say it’s not a sound I’d care to hear again.’

‘Uh-huh,’ the old woman manages. And then, just one last thing out of her for the next hour. Its syllables cracked and tinny, a broken toy of a word. ‘Wonderful,’ she says.

Margot glances back at the others and notices Wade standing on his own off to the side of the trail. Even Mr Bader has passed in front of him.

What she also registers is that Wade has his shotgun butt raised to his shoulder. His aim on the back of Elsie’s head.

A joke. Yet Wade’s crooked smile arrives only after he catches Margot watching him. Even from where she stands, she can see the exposed red tip next to the Mossberg’s trigger. The safety is off.

By the time Margot makes it back to him, he has lowered the gun and is fishing in his pocket.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Just kidding around.’

‘That thing’s loaded.’

‘It
is
?’

Wade looks down at the gun at his side and shakes his head. Then he opens his fist to show three tablets laid out in his palm.

‘If you don’t stop chewing on those you’re going to drop before noon.’

‘I need them.’

‘And I need
you.
’

‘I’m hurting.’

‘Give them to me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Wade takes a step and draws back his hand. It gives him the room to deliver a roundhouse to the side of her head if he chooses.

‘Don’t,’ she says.

Wade shrugs. Flicks all three pills into his mouth and swallows.

Whenever she hears someone say that people never change, Margot thinks that, among all truisms, this is the least true. In her experience, people changed, all right. They did nothing
but
change. Take Wade, for instance. There’s no chance you’d ever confuse the man she had heartdrunkenly fallen for almost a decade ago with this wounded animal whose actions she could no longer predict.

A big kid off a cattle operation in Alberta, who had come north to bounce between fill-in jobs in the mines and government road crews, who happened to find himself playing blackjack at the casino in Dawson when Margot slid up onto the stool next to his. Until recently, Wade has figured this as a rare visit of good luck. What Margot keeps to herself is this original secret: she had been staring at the broad-backed boy with the wolf
eyes, pale blue and wild, for nearly an hour before choosing the seat at his side.

‘Looks to me like you’ve got a system,’ Wade had told her after watching her win—and himself lose—four hands in a row. She could feel him wanting to speak to her as soon as she brushed her arm against his when she threw her money on the table for chips. And it was true that he wanted to say something to the beautiful Indian girl—a
woman
, undeniably, uncomfortably—that one of his hard-headed foremen might say. His search for words coupled with his excitement forced him into tapping for another card after being dealt an eighteen.

‘Never had a system,’ she said. ‘I just go when I want to go. Stick when it feels good to stick.’

‘It’s working for you.’

‘You should try it sometime.’

‘Playing by gut?’

‘No,’ Margot said, winning another hand. ‘Doing what feels good.’

She told him that she had a plan to start up a guiding business in one of the last of the ‘out there’ towns, where she would attract the serious hunters and ‘none of this kayak day-trip bullshit’. Wade offered his entire savings—just under two thousand—to become a partner. This was after only three days together, holed up in their room with the sloped floor at the Winchester Hotel, listening to The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival covers tremble through the walls at night,
and making love on the screeching bed in the afternoons. Margot remembers thinking that she liked this one more than she could explain. She had distinct thoughts speak themselves to her, clear announcements that had the bracing ring of insight to them.
This one’s a gentleman
, she’d thought, and
Once he gets his hooks in me, he’ll never quit.
It makes her angry every time she recognizes how one’s own certainties can be dead wrong one minute and dead right the next.

Margot tries to forgive herself for her role in bringing on Wade’s dulled eyes, the doubled gravitational pull on his bones, but she can never quite free herself of blame. He was beautiful once. Now, she’s noticed that he’s stopped looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. Instead, he brushes his teeth in the hall. Shaves in the dark.

And lately, even more troubling habits. Less than a week ago, right after dawn, she’d found him standing in his boxers in the yard, staring at the green hills as though waiting for a signal. And just yesterday afternoon, he’d been cleaning his shotgun in the living room when she passed on her way to the kitchen. As she opened the fridge door, the side glance she’d taken of him became suddenly clear. He didn’t have his eye to the bore, peering down it to make sure it was free of obstruction as one is supposed to do. It was his mouth. Wade’s lips wrapped around the end of the barrel.

When she’d run back into the living room, the
Mossberg sat across Wade’s lap. She was ready to confront him—he
knew
she’d seen him—but he met her eyes with a placid emptiness. Not the look of someone who means to kill himself. She’d caught Wade stealing a taste of what it is to be someone else. Another man’s horror in the moment before being killed.

‘You better get that,’ he said finally. Only then did Margot hear the dropped carton of orange juice glugging over the kitchen floor.

Margot tells herself that what keeps them together now is the business. It stopped convincing her a long time ago. The hunting trips have been managed by her alone pretty much since they started, and even Wade would admit that she’s twice the tracker and three times the shot that he is. When she cuts away the bogus justifications for staying with a man she has come to fear more than love, Margot recognizes that what really keeps her with Wade is the memory of what he once was. She had been the only person present to observe the brief moment he was whole. Now she is this moment’s guardian, carrying it with her, repeating it in her head as though a lost language and she its last remaining speaker.

In less than a minute of the broad strides she normally attacks the ground with, Margot resumes her position at the head of the line, climbing to the top of a soft ridge. There’s no point in any more considerations of the past. Not
out here, anyway. If there is a bear for them to take she’s got to stay awake for all of them. Starting now. Because although she hasn’t seen or heard anything big since entering the bush at the Lapie Canyon Road, Margot is halfway sure there’s a bear close by. She may have lost confidence in her emotional intuitions, but her hunter’s instincts are rarely wrong.

She heads another thirty yards up ahead of the others and raises herself on tiptoes, stretching her nose into the air as a bear does. Something new is there. It comes and goes so quickly she can’t identify it, though she knows the regular texture of scents that makes up the forest at this time of year has been interrupted. It’s not the grizzly they’re looking for, either. It might only be a whiff of her own worry, the slightly bitter taste that foreshadows a headache. It could be something dead.

Margot lowers herself onto her heels and watches the hunting party make its way up the hill. The smell she caught is gone now, delivered on a fluke of wind. Something in the already fading memory of it makes her think of Miles. She knows it is the nature of smell to colonize whatever people or objects you leave near it. But it’s too late to separate them now. Margot has summoned Miles’s scarred face to her mind, and with it the air now carries the faintest trace of smoke.

Through the truck’s bug-smeared windshield, Miles looks at his cabin and feels that it is someone else’s. Perhaps it’s that he’s never really taken note of it before, not as he does now, tracing the wonky lines of its walls, the pockets of weeds sprouting out between the roof tiles. This is where he started from, but some invisible renovations have been done in his absence. His inclination to back up and surrender the property altogether is as strong as his desire to walk in and see what changes have been made inside.

He steps out of the truck and slides a hand over the hood as though calming a skittish horse. What’s strange about the cabin, he realizes now, is that there is somebody inside. He has never seen the lights on from outside, never watched a shadow walk across the living room to the kitchen and return with plates in its hands. The simple observation that others are right now sitting in his home strikes him as an overwhelming intimacy. His scar burns in shyness.

When he walks in, Alex and Rachel are eating mooseburgers at the living-room table.

‘Mungo gave them to us,’ Alex tells him.

‘They taste funny,’ Rachel adds, though she follows this observation by taking a huge bite of the black meat.

Miles stands on the rubber mat by the door and watches them chew.

‘I thought you’d be gone,’ he says to Alex.

‘We would have been. But you’re back a day early.’

‘I am?’

‘We’re packed and everything.’

‘You’re right. I’m early.’

‘We could go back to the motel, if you want.’

‘No,’ Miles says, shaking his head at them. ‘It’s too late for any of that tonight.’

Rachel waves half her burger over her head, and Miles pads over to take the seat next to her. The girl slides her plate in front of him. The smell of the meat reminds Miles of his hunger.

‘It tastes like the zoo,’ Rachel warns him, her voice lowered. ‘But it’s pretty good.’

Miles nods at her. Then he lifts the food the girl has given him and eats.

The sheet parts on the opposite side of the bed from where Miles lies half asleep. He wants so badly to be touched he doesn’t mind if what slides in with him now is a creature of his own invention, a dream he’s managed to bend into the shape of his need. It could be the ghost of the kid making room for himself and Miles wouldn’t object. It is too late for him even to pretend that he could choose what contact he might be offered anymore, or whether it came from the living or the dead.

But the touch, when it comes, is warm. Smooth fingertips tracing the wings of his shoulder blades, flattening into circles over the whole of his back. Firm enough to build the always surprising heat
that comes when skin moves over another’s skin.

When he rolls over to stroke the back of his knuckles down Alex’s neck, Miles feels the pulse there, a hard tom-tomming that fully awakens him. The clock radio reads 5:14 AM but there is light in the room. The first intimation of dawn creates a stencilling of his pants thrown over a chair, the paper lantern tied around the ceiling bulb, his boots yawning side by side by the door. He can see Alex, too.

At first, the sight of her naked body is too much for him and his eyes blink away. But when she draws closer she occupies his entire field of vision. As though for the first time, he takes note of Alex’s face, the buckle of bone halfway down her nose, visible only in profile. It is one of the thousand reasons that bound him to her, years ago. He remembers this and sees her crooked nose as too good a thing to ever wish it was otherwise.

Their kisses are patient. Nothing will be missed. To Alex, Miles’s lips taste the way they always had, something at once sweet and earthy, like black licorice. Without speaking, it is his tongue that tells her that it’s really him with her now. She realizes that she has come to him for this. A confirmation that something essential remained in him that she could identify. A single, recovered detail that ran through the before and after of their lives.