The Wildfire Season (24 page)

‘They’ll get us out of here before it does.’

As though in rebuttal, even as Mungo speaks, the fire bares its orange teeth over the crest. A dozen crowns fired in spontaneous fury that reminds Alex of telescopic images of the sun, the flares that reach out into space like yearning arms.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispers. She reaches around Rachel’s chest and locks her fingers together.

‘The river’s no good,’ Mungo says in answer to the question he knows Alex is about to ask.

‘Why?’

‘It’s too high, too fast.’

‘But we could stand in it if we had to.’

‘Not for long,’ Mungo says with a sigh that tells Alex he’s already tried it in his head. ‘That water is
cold
. If you stood up to your knees in it you’d buckle under within two minutes. Step in any further and the current will grab ahold and take you with it.’

‘
Look
, Momma,’ Rachel says.

Alex searches the riverbank, hoping the girl has spotted something that she’s missed. ‘What, baby? I don’t see anything.’

‘Not there.
There
.’

Alex swings around to where Rachel is looking. The raven, flapping off its perch on the backstop and toward the fiery ridge.

‘It’s so
fast
,’ the girl says.

‘That’s right. It’s a fast old bird.’

Mungo and Rachel share a glance that Alex doesn’t notice. He understands that the girl is not speaking of the raven, but the fire.

What a day, Mungo thinks. Not yet four o’clock and he’s already made two promises, one to Miles, one to his girls. This from a man who learned early on that the best way to avoid disappointing others is to teach them to expect nothing of him. And now?
Now he’s marching across the infield to find his own family and offer a whole new round of assurances. He hopes that the night is long. Sleep is out of the question now anyway. Mungo has struck a deal with himself. He will let his eyes close only after he sees his word kept in every case he’s offered it.

The only way she breathes is through her husband’s name. Three times in the first hour alone Miles has to stop to shake Mrs Bader out of a faint. She will be walking with him one moment—or rather, swinging her feet and kicking at stones as Miles hauls the rest of her in his arms—and then she goes limp. Her head lolls on his shoulder, lips gaping. It takes something different each time to bring her back. He sings to her, pulls her hair, shouts one of Mungo’s profanities in her face. Once, he kisses her cheek. Every rasp of air she takes when she returns is exhaled as a word—
Jackson
—that enters Miles’s ear and fills him with the grief the dead man’s wife is too burdened to carry on her own.

They climb on into dusk, each glimpse caught of the ridgeline above less determined than the last by the thickening darkness. None of the thoughts Miles has can be shared:

He cannot carry the old woman to the top on his own.

The fire may already be waiting on the other side.

They will stop to sleep and never wake.

The bear will find them first.

Whenever he forces himself from his mindpictures of Alex and Rachel, these are the only ideas he has. It leaves him to work his burning legs in silence. Why would he share these hopeless probabilities with anyone else? Elsie Bader has long retreated into a simplified world, a pillow fort that a child makes to protect herself from outside terrors. And Margot knows better than he all the reasons they will fail.

For the first few hours, Mrs Bader’s weight had numbed his arm to any sensation but occasional cramps. Now it’s on fire. Miles wonders if his shoulder has been dislocated, though he can’t look and doesn’t want to touch it in case it has. The idea of trying to switch her from one side to the other promises new agonies he can’t afford to risk. And judging from the way Tom’s chin keeps falling against his chest, he’s doing all he can to stay awake. Miles reminds himself that they are still trudging upwards. He will happily sacrifice an arm so long as they keep eating the slope, inch by inch.

He has been fighting to hold the old woman up for half an hour before Miles realizes they have reached the crest and are now sliding down the steep southern face. There is not enough time to enjoy even a moment’s triumph. In the dark, the grade falls away in front of him so that he can’t stop tripping forward into nothingness.

Margot is ahead of him now, farther down and maybe a hundred yards off to the right. He can’t see her and she doesn’t call for him. But Miles is sure
she has fallen. He can hear her cough with each new impact, the rocks clattering under her limbs.

When Miles, Tom and Mrs Bader reach the south treeline, he finds Margot leaning against a hollow snag. Something trickling down her cheeks catches the wink of the moon.

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Looks like you’re cut.’

‘I’m fine. Just not much left in the tank.’

‘We’re good, though.’

‘We’re perfect.’

‘Because if we—’

‘Save it, Miles. All right?’

He is about to apologize to her—for not reaching her sooner, for Wade, for being the tongue-tied oaf that he is—but his head starts to swim and he knows if he doesn’t start walking again he will pass out here and now.

A blur of grey encircles them. All of the trees are dead, the branch ends dry and sharp, dirty fingernails lashing their foreheads. Spruce beetles. The trees strangled by an infestation that sucks the green out and leaves them a metallic monochrome. When a group stand together like this, it is as though the world has been bleached of all its colour.

A hawk owl quizzes itself high in the swaying top of a black spruce—
Who? Who?
—before flapping into the night to escape the answer.

The forest forces them into what feels like circles. Margot shoves her way ahead to look for
a game trail to follow, but there is only a new knotting of trunks. Their breathing is so loud within the walls of trees it strikes all of them as the whisperings of spirits.

He can’t decide when it was that he started hearing their breathing joined by another. A couple of times he stops long enough to listen for the thud of paws or footsteps, but there is only the waiting forest.

Yet each time he starts again, a hoarse in-andout follows them. Sometimes it’s close enough that, if he turned, Miles is certain he would meet its eyes.

‘I hear the birds coming, Momma.’

‘Is Mr Raven bringing his friends here?’

‘No, Momma. The
big
birds.’

Now that Alex has tuned her ears to it, she too can hear the helicopters whining over the hills.

‘We’re going soon, aren’t we?’

‘Soon, baby.’

‘And Stump’s coming too?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘But Mr Raven’s
already
gone.’

‘He never liked Stump much anyway. I guess he just had enough.’

‘I guess,’ Rachel says. ‘Or maybe he has something to do.’

All over the softball diamond, Ross River tilts its head back to see what shape their delivery is to take. To Alex, they look like two hundred people all searching for the night’s first star.

The light toothpicks his eyes through the earth. Worm tunnels that allowed him to breathe can now be followed to the surface. He blinks up at a brown world nicked with blue. He had been so cold overnight he dreamed he lay under ice, not soil. But just minutes after the sun’s first crowning, the weight that holds him down has already warmed. It feels like another’s body on top of his.

Though he’d intermittently convinced himself of the possibility of escape through the night, Wade recognizes that now he must actually attempt it. It disappoints him in an abstract way that he won’t be able to. And he knows that if he lives on into the next round of darkness, it will be bad. Even with his loss of blood and lack of water, he figures it might take a long time to die down here.

Yet there is still the formality of an attempt before he can allow himself to give up. He concentrates all of of his strength into his right arm and pushes its fist into the largest of the gaps. It nudges enough
rocks aside to slide up to the elbow. The breeze against his skin wakens him, as though his mouth had been freed instead of his twiddling fingers.

His wounded arm is forced up just as easily. He uses the one hand that works properly to pluck away the rocks on top of him. With the other, he bulldozes the soil from over his face.

After what he guesses to be hours he sits up. Sends a finger round his mouth to scoop out the gritty wads.

He’s in an aspen grove. Up the slope to his right he can glimpse the avalanche slide. The bear hadn’t taken him far.

He holds his breath and rises. A nylon Lazarus.

The first few steps hurt as though he breaks a toe each time his foot meets the ground. It helps once he tells himself it doesn’t matter. Pain has no consequence for him. He has come back, and this time all his suffering will be set aside to be tallied later.

He makes his way onto the slide and, for the first time, smells the smoke. Then sees it. A swerving haze, trying on shapes for itself.

Above him, he notices what’s left of Bader’s body. There is no reflex left in him—of sympathy, of aid, of revulsion—to slow his step.

The old man’s dead
, Wade thinks.
So was I once
.

It would have been a fifty-fifty guess which way Margot had gone, over the ridge to the south or back toward the truck. The fire makes it simpler. When he’s climbed high enough above the
treeline to look north into the valley, he sees milelong arms of fire reaching across the trail they’d come here on. Whoever the bear didn’t bury will be running the other way.

He stops and blows snot out one side of his nose. A plug of dirt from his grave comes with it.

Wade lowers his gaze from the old man’s body to the rocks around his own boots. There, shining from within, is Bader’s Winchester. Such a beautiful gun. He picks it up, puts his eye to the telescopic site. The crosshairs find individual stones in the pile he’d made digging himself out. Lifts it higher and he could touch the nearest flames, leaping from the spruce tops. Even he could shoot whatever he wanted to from a quarter-mile away.

He sidesteps to where Margot had emptied the rifle’s cartridges and finds five. Loads them all.

Wade cradles the gun against his chest and walks on.

Alive, but less than he was. He carries less of what he remembered of being himself, anyway. His name. A place he started from and the story of how he got to where he is. The thousand laws and million sub-rules that condition his range of possible actions. Wade finds that all of this agrees with him. He can move with only one purpose before him, and that purpose could shift from moment to moment and it wouldn’t matter. It’s like being preprogrammed. A happy, empty robot.

He makes his way off the slide feeling only a
niggling impatience. What he will do, he would like to do now.

But first things first. He will carry on higher along the hill face. He will let the smoke cover his progress when the trees can’t. He will watch for anything that moves. And whatever moves, he’ll kill.

Dawn sprinkles down on them. A seasoning of greens and mustards collecting over the dark lines of things. The cold has hardened the moisture on their lips into moustaches of frost. Everything is coated in a layer of see-through silver. When the full sun appears through the branches the ice melts so quickly Miles doubts he’d seen it at all. Water hangs off the pine needles like tears.

As the ground levels off, the trees give way to wide bands of scrub. Sagewort and wintergreen for the first while, a soft carpet of grasses. Soon, though, they are bushwhacking through harder stuff. Junipers, wild cranberries. Given that they don’t know where they’re going, it makes little difference to their progress. From what could be one of five directions, a woodpecker natters against the frozen bark.

Since the first signs of morning, Miles hasn’t heard Elsie Bader speak her husband’s name. He carries her full weight now. When he catches her with eyes closed, nothing he says or does can open them. He realizes, with a peculiar indifference, that he may be piggybacking a corpse.

Sometime before noon, he catches sight of a
helicopter thudding south. Even though it’s impossible from this distance, he tries to see what faces might be pressed against its windows. He almost tricks himself into meeting the girl’s dark eyes.

‘You figure it’s going to the camp?’

Margot’s voice surprises him. He had come to think he was alone.

Miles nods and follows Margot’s boots. He makes it less than twenty feet before Mrs Bader slides off his back.

She makes no sound on impact, eyes still closed, her limbs folded and soft. Kneeling, Miles looks at her face in the new sunlight. She probably has children somewhere. Married, busy, with families of their own. Pagers buzzing at their waists. Channel surfing.

His hands slide under her spine and come up easy. With a moan, Miles finds his balance with the old woman cradled in his forearms. He knows it’s only the exhaustion, some symptom that shows he’s come to the end. Whatever its cause, he smiles. It’s the image he imagines the raven in the willows up ahead has of him that he can’t help but find funny. A groom carrying his bride over a lost threshold.

The second, and last, time Margot phoned Miles was in the last week of May. When he heard her voice on the line he was expecting another indirect invitation to her bed, a smoky mention of Wade being out of town for the night. They had carried on their affair at this tentative pace, and it had
proved enough to hold both of them to the lives they had started it in. Only Wade had changed. His drinking purposeful, his backhanded slaps leaving Margot with bruises she explained away as implausible accidents, if she spoke of them at all.

Wade knew. Not that he’d brought it up with her—not that he ever mentioned Miles’s name—but even he had awakened to the meaning behind Margot and Miles’ Welcome Inn glances. Not their desire, but a shared sympathy. An
Are you okay?
shot through the blue smoke.

Wade knew. Miles could see it in him. It was, in part, why when he heard Margot’s voice on the phone he had a list of polite refusals already prepared in his mind.
It’s not you, it’s me…There’s someone I’m just not over yet…He’s a bastard, I know. But it still isn’t fair to Wade
…He might use some or all of these, depending on Margot’s willingness to accept them.

‘I have to see you,’ she said. The words pure soap opera, yet their tone was spontaneous.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Is it Wade? Has he been—?’

‘It’s not him.’

‘I was just on my way out the door,’ he said, and it was true. His pickle and Spam sandwich zipped into his pack, which was his picnic to be eaten on this year’s first trip to the top of Eagle’s Nest Bluff.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Just a hike,’ he said, and waited for Margot
to let him go. Perhaps thirty seconds passed in silence. ‘Would you like to come?’

‘Don’t pick me up. I’ll come there.’

They said little on the drive. Margot kept her face turned from him, gazing out the window but without fixing her eyes on any passing feature. He knew it wasn’t possible, but Miles felt as though she was angry at him and he was having to undergo the vaguely familiar exercise of wondering what he had done or said wrong. It had been so long since he’d been alone like this with a woman that he had forgotten the conversational rituals of intimacy—the meaningful pantomimes, the punishments of words both offered and denied.

They parked halfway in on the overgrown lumber road and hiked to the bluff’s base. Miles assumed the role of guide, though the trail was plain to both of them. The day brightened as they climbed higher, as though they were stepping through the clouds. By the time they reached the plateau the sun left them patting their pockets for sunglasses they’d both left behind.

Miles hid the awkwardness of having nothing to say by pretending it took him longer to catch his breath than it did. Bending over with his hands on his knees offered him the added advantage of not having to look directly at Margot. She had been the one to follow him. It was her job to start talking. Yet he felt like it was he who had asked her to come all the way up here only to forget why.

He tried for an icebreaker. Something harmless.
If he was really lucky, they might get out of this without any serious talk at all.

‘It’s a helluva view from up—’

‘The thing is, I’m pregnant,’ Margot said. Then, after a sip of breath, ‘And no, it’s not yours.’

‘Not mine,’ Miles managed to repeat.

‘It couldn’t be, right? We’ve been safe and everything.’

‘We were safe.’

‘I’ve made an appointment at the Women’s Place down in Whitehorse for tomorrow afternoon. That’s what they call it. The Women’s Place. Like all they do is sell cosmetics.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, spreading his feet wider apart on the rocks, suddenly top-heavy. ‘This can’t be an easy decision.’

‘I haven’t even made it yet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought it might depend on what you have to say.’

‘I’m not sure I have anything to do with it.’

‘Not if you don’t want to, no.’

Miles stood up straight, though the breathlessness had returned to him for real.

‘Have you talked to Wade about it?’

‘Last night. Which explains the bags under my eyes.’

‘What exactly did you tell him?’

‘Everything. About me, about you. I dropped every bomb I had.’

‘Well. Well, well.’

‘You said it.’

‘I guess he was pretty upset.’

‘That’s the thing. He wasn’t upset at all. He went from being shocked straight to happy. No,
overjoyed.
’

‘Didn’t he wonder if it’s his?’

‘I told him it might not be. Because the truth is, I was hoping deep down that he would hear what I had to tell him and leave. That I could push him away by using you. I know that’s the chicken-shit way to go, but there you have it.’

‘People do strange things,’ Miles said lamely, but couldn’t think of any other way of phrasing the thought in his head.

‘Yes, they do. Like when Wade hears that I’ve been—he hears what I’ve got to tell him—and all he can do is start crying like it’s the best news he’s ever heard.’

‘Maybe it is.’

‘Maybe it is. So I do my best to rain on his parade. I tell him that if I have this baby, we could never be sure. Then he kisses me. And you know what he says? He says, “Yes, we would. We’d be sure it was ours.”’

Margot turned from him, her hand shading her eyes as though she was trying to spot something she’d glimpsed moving in the valley below. When she spoke again her voice was even, though louder, her words blown back on the wind coming across the plateau from the west.

‘He said he didn’t care. About what happened
with you, or anything else. We were having a family and that’s what mattered. This is
Wade
we’re talking about. And here he is being—I don’t know—
noble.
’

She stepped away but kept talking so that Miles had to follow her to hear. He stopped just over her shoulder. Close enough that he could smell her hair, her skin warmed from the effort of the climb, her rushing disclosures.

‘Sometimes, just to get away, I go up to Dawson and do a little gambling,’ she said. ‘It’s where I met Wade. I loved him from the first blackjack hand he lost. But at the same time, I knew we weren’t a forever sort of thing. He’s too simple. I can’t spend all my life looking out for somebody like that.’

‘You don’t have to tell me this.’

‘Yes, I do. And I have to tell you that I’m a good gambler, Miles. At the end of the night, I’m almost never down. I don’t know how it works. There’s no secret. Nothing but feel. Like when I first saw you.’

Margot turned before he had a chance to step back so that her face was very close.

‘If you say no to this, that’s it. We can just be friends, or just be nothing at all. But I figured I had to put this in front of you.’

‘You’re seeing things in me that aren’t there.’

‘Maybe. But if I’m wrong, it’s my time to waste, isn’t it?’

He wants to say yes. Margot was wrong about him, he felt sure. She was pegging her hopes for improvement on a man for no better reason than
she didn’t know him as well as the man she was with. And if Miles had run once, there’s no way he could say he wouldn’t run again. But was it his job to refuse the good luck that came his way?

In the end, Miles’s answer was his silence. He stepped back and his eyes turned away to slide along the Yukon’s current below, the light popping off the green surface like camera flashes. He’d never been here with someone else before, and it was a mistake. The place had the same effect on others, apparently, as it did on him. It drew out the honesty we work the hardest to fool ourselves about, the things you can face only briefly for the pain of its light, like the sun on the river below.

‘I hear you,’ Margot said after perhaps three full minutes.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You listened. Most wouldn’t have done even that.’

Margot stood, and Miles thought she was about to start down the trail to the truck, but instead she came forward and kissed him. Not forgiving or grateful or friendly. Not a kiss meant to communicate something else, but a real one, flavourful and promising. It let him know what he was going to miss. And when she pulled away, he already did.