The Wildfire Season (11 page)

A day and a half later, Miles is in his truck, alone, heading out of town. His head emptied of all thoughts but one.

By the time he gets back, Alex and the girl will be gone.

He’d decided this was the best way to handle things only the night before, lying awake in his bed, trying not to think about the events of the preceding morning and afternoon. Even now, the day before only comes to him in painful snatches. His climb up Eagle’s Nest Bluff with Alex and Rachel. The osprey flying over the river below. The handful of words he exchanged with the girl at the cliff’s top that he’s still trying to unscramble. Later. He’d get around to their strange hours on Eagle’s Nest Bluff later, to sorting out the riddle of what he asked and what she answered over the interminable revisitations that were fated to be the rest of his life. He’s just glad that, this time, he has a halfway believable excuse to make his escape.

As part of his duties as supervisor, Miles has to check on the handful of fire watchtowers in the region at least once each month. Two of them haven’t seen him since June. A tour that should take him about three days. More than long enough to ensure that when he returns, nobody will be waiting for him.

He tries to credit himself for at least giving Alex a call before he left. But even that hadn’t gone as he’d planned. When she answered, the idea of a no-harm-done goodbye strikes him as ridiculous, and in an instant he thinks of something else. As it passes his lips, he wonders whether he intended to say it in the first place.

‘I was thinking,’ he says. ‘I’m going to be checking on some towers for the next couple of nights and, seeing what Earl is gouging you for, I thought you might want to stay here while I’m gone.’

‘Where will you leave the keys?’ she answers without hesitation.

Miles knew they would go, had wanted them to go, yet had somehow counted on seeing the girl one more time before they did. Not that he has anything to say to her. He just assumed he would be given the chance to take a snapshot of her before she left. One he would conjure not with a lens but in his head. An everchanging version that would age as he aged, so that she might be called upon if needed, far down the line.

‘I’m terrible at this,’ he says with an idiotic chuckle.

‘I don’t know of anybody who’s good at it.’

‘Well, then. I guess I want to thank you for bringing her here.’

‘Say her name.’

‘What?’

‘She’s like Tim. And your dad, Edward. Not saying their names doesn’t make them go away.’

He could argue with this, or simply hang up, because he’s not sure that she’s right, and even if she is, this kind of dissection is the last thing he needs. On any other of the preceding thousand mornings of his life, such prying would instantly push him into rage, and he waits for it, eyes closed.

‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘Thank you for bringing Rachel.’

They may mumble a farewell after this, they may not. He doesn’t remember anything more, in any case. Miles hears the click at the end of the line and the world goes black, like standing in a windowless room when the bulb burns out. He’s not afraid. It’s a matter of getting used to it. You just stay where you are in the dark for a while until you can almost see again.

Is there a polite way to tell someone to shut the fuck up? This has been the primary question Margot has found herself mulling over on the forty-five-minute drive out of town and down the seldom used Lapie Canyon Road, listening to Elsie Bader chirp on about, well, about
what
? Sweet bugger all. A shower of touristy inquiries and
exclamations at ‘all the nature’ around them that are so empty of significance Margot can only guess the old woman has carefully intended to speak without saying a single thing.

Margot checks the rear-view mirror every few minutes, expecting Mr Bader to take things in hand and stuff his bug shirt in his wife’s mouth, but he only pretends to sleep, his forehead leaving grease stains on the window. He’s used to this, apparently. And Wade, Margot knows, is so painkilled that, for the moment, he is able to endure even this fresh hell.

Mungo’s son is back there, too, having been brought along at the last minute. She waved Tom over to her truck as she’d passed him and Mungo giving Alex and Rachel a tour of the town and asked him if he’d like to make a couple hundred bucks. The kid had joined her in the bush from time to time in the past. He was capable and, most important as far as Margot is concerned, learned by example instead of asking dumb questions. Just the sort of help she could use carrying the packs on a job like this. Tom is alone in appearing amused by Mrs Bader’s running commentary. He keeps a sideways grin on his face at any rate, though true to form, offers no words of his own.

What’s the worst thing about this woman?
Margot wonders, and knows the answer even as she asks it. It’s that everything is ‘wonderful’ to her. The word is so liberally sprayed through her musings that it makes Margot’s teeth ache. By the
time the truck pulls over at the trailhead, Elsie Bader has singlehandedly managed to bleach all the wonder out of the world. And not just the formerly wonderful things one might discover on this particular morning, but forevermore, as though her southern-fried burbles have veiled what was in fact a sinister incantation, a black spell released into the air.

Things are a little better once they start into the woods, though Margot can tell the going will be slow. She could hear Mr Bader’s laboured breathing within the first hundred yards. This, coupled with his disturbing refusal to talk, has contributed to a pall being cast over the hunting party before they put the first half mile behind them. It’s obvious that Wade isn’t about to be of much assistance, either. As a result, Tom shoulders more weight than any of them, though the kid doesn’t seem to mind. Every time Margot glances at him he’s keeping stride next to Elsie Bader. The two of them have become fast, if inexplicable, friends.

They stop early for breakfast. Mrs Bader pulls all the food out of her pack and sets to laying out a lavish picnic of their rations. Wade starts a fire and puts a pot on for coffee before splaying out on his back, his arm covering his eyes. ‘I’ll fix us a
wonderful
brunch in a jiffy!’ Mrs Bader calls out, and for the first time, Margot finds herself a little grateful for the woman’s presence. The old lady’s got pep, you had to admit.

Her husband, on the other hand, shuffles over
to Margot where she stands out of hearing of the others, his complexion showing only slightly more colour than the bark on the trunks of birch that surround them.

‘How do we get them to come to us?’

‘We don’t. We go to them.’

‘I read that they can smell us from miles off,’ he says, sniffing. ‘Why not just spray around something they like and pick ‘em off when they show up?’

‘It doesn’t work that way. A bear smells us and goes in the other direction more often than it comes any closer.’

‘Unless they’re hungry enough. Or if what they smell is fear.’

‘A bear doesn’t smell fear. It smells
you.
To a bear, people are nothing
but
fear.’

‘That’s funny. It’s a view I subscribe to myself.’

Margot doesn’t laugh, because he isn’t joking. Jackson Bader had been the president of the fourth-largest steelmaker in the Midwest over the twenty-five years that America needed steel more than anything else, more than Japanese computer engineering or million-dollar slogans brainstormed by Ivy League marketing brats. They were the last of the good times, as far as Bader is concerned, or at least the comprehensible times. The days when what was manufactured were hard things—cars, girders, missiles—instead of fluffball ideas. There were few better than he at what he did. And what was that? More than anything, his job was to put people in their place. He’s aware
of the accusations of coldness. Even he can’t deny the sweeping layoffs, the unforgiving suppression of boardroom
coups d’état
, the union busting. But Jackson Bader would identify his principal talent not as heartlessness, but courage. He was among the rare company of men possessed of the true leader’s capacity for making unpleasant decisions, the tough-loving patriarch able to hand down the punishments required in keeping an orderly home.

Even though they have lingered in the breakfast camp for a quarter-hour already, Bader continues to swallow air in gulps. To Margot, what’s worrying is not so much his lack of conditioning—she’s dealt with worse clients on that count—but that he seems to be fighting something within him. He breathes like a man who has forgotten how.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Don’t trouble yourself about me, Miss Lemontagne,’ he says, pronouncing it
Lemon Tang.

‘I just need to know if you can make it to where we need to go.’

‘You must have learned a thing or two about nature in your time out in this shit.’ He steps forward and grabs her forearm. Close enough that she can smell his breath. Wet straw and Pepsodent. ‘People got to take care of themselves, don’t you think?’

‘Get your hand—’

‘So all you got to worry about is finding us some big footprints. How’s that?’

Margot jerks her arm free. Without it to hold on to, Bader instantly shrinks. The brief show of strength is gone, and he’s a bloodless old man again, spinning his head around to find his wife.

Margot watches him go and wishes her feelings about Jackson Bader were more consistent, a dislike on all fronts. But the fact is, there is something in the way he speaks to her that she can’t help but be a little interested in listening to. It’s there in the worldly gravel at the back of his throat: conspiratorial, teasing, letting her in on an indecent joke that she alone could appreciate. The effect he has on her puts Margot in the strange (but not entirely unfamiliar) situation of seeking approval from a man she has little respect for.

It may only be that he’s a good-looking son of a bitch for his age. That’s what Wade had said about Bader when he first showed up. Margot felt it was an accurate enough description. She
did
find Jackson Bader handsome, in the bullheaded way of grown-up GIs or college football stars. The slightly ridiculous Robert Mitchum squint. But it’s none of these assets that prevent Margot from hating the old man. It’s that he doesn’t care
what
she thinks that makes her curious about him. He’s come out here for a reason that has only a secondary relation to bringing down a Boone and Crockett grizzly, and she’d like to know what it is.

When Margot returns to the camp’s fire, Elsie Bader asks another of her tour-bus questions.

‘Margot! I was wondering how many bears
there would be in the Yukon. Tom says he couldn’t guess.’

‘Nobody knows the exact number. But most have it that there’s twice as many grizzlies living outside of Whitehorse as there are people.’

‘Oh, Jackson!’ Mrs Bader exclaims. ‘We’re
outnumbered
!’

Bader opens his mouth and shows his teeth. A store-bought smile of new dentures, vacant as an ice tray.

‘It’ll only make it easier for them to find us, dear,’ he says.

Miles’s plan is to visit two towers, each about fifty miles apart as the crow flies. Normally, he looks forward to these tours—talking to the watchers who spend four months straight on their own doing little aside from looking out over the endless north, people who, like Miles, treasure their loneliness. He likes visiting the unmanned towers even more. He usually lingers on these trips, enjoying the fulfillment of responsibility while taking pleasure in being left to his own devices. But this time he keeps moving. The first tower is vacant, and he hopes to check on it and head out again before nightfall, sleeping midway between it and the next. It may not be so easy. Through the rearview mirror, a black thunderhead pursues him.

When he parks a mile from the first tower and hikes in to its base, frigid drops are already slapping against his forehead. It makes the climb up
the ladder chillier than he would like. He wishes he’d brought his gloves. The aluminum rungs bite through his palms. He makes himself confirm every new grip by sight.

By the time he climbs onto the deck, the thunderhead has become enormous on the horizon. Miles steps inside and closes the door. The wind whispers threats through the glass.

Even when fully functional, the only piece of operating equipment on hand aside from a radio is an Osborne Fire Finder, which hasn’t been removed from this tower yet. Miles strokes its rotating metal ring, the handle that turns its sight around 360 degrees to spot smoke from any direction. A solid, useful thing. As is the tower’s only place to sit: a swivel captain’s chair, its legs wrapped in layers of chipped-glass insulation. During periods of lightning, the watchers sit in this ‘safe seat’, so that if a bolt strikes, the charge will pass through everything but them. Miles counts two zigzags touch the earth in the time it takes him to catch his breath.

He settles himself in the grounded chair and sends his mind out toward the approaching storm, circling over the crowns of black spruce. There is something in the spongy, coastal sky that makes him think of his mother, sitting alone in her rainstained bungalow near the tracks in the south end of Nanaimo, studying the next chess move she will record on a postcard to mail to her runaway son. She would have the window open, letting in
the intermittent whiffs of salt water, petrol and salmon emptied onto the docks. Now his mind has no choice but to stay with her. Floating over the town he grew up in and where his mother will be buried, trapped in a spiral of memory.

After his father left, Miles was a bad kid here. His crimes were soft-drugged, vandalizing, splitlipped. Yet they were serious enough to flirt with lengthy visits to juvie detention centres and to leave his mother in a state of near-constant worry. He’s sorry about this as much as anything.

All this was before the fussily landscaped condos were built next to the port, before the pedestrian signals were outfitted with timers that count down from thirty so that the arthritic gentry could calculate the pace of their crossings for raisin buns at the ‘cappuccino bistro’ where a bar called the Bucket of Blood used to stand. Miles looks down and sees that other things haven’t changed at all. The cracked concrete snaking away from the harbour and falling past the Commercial Hotel. The twinkling of Fiesta Square Bowling’s rotating F, towering over everything as though it was Nanaimo’s principal claim, the promise it wished to beam out to the ships that might spot it as they found their way in from a furious sea.