The Wildfire Season (26 page)

After a laughing goodbye, the director snaps the phone shut and returns it to his belt. Then he starts talking at Miles. His pink chin bouncing up and down.

‘This Comeback Fire of yours is something else, Miles,’ Parks is telling him, eyebrows raised but with an admiring half smile, as though he’s talking about a giant lake trout Miles has just pulled into their boat. ‘It’s breaking all the rules, that’s for sure. Definitely one for the history books.’

‘I couldn’t give a shit about history right now, Dennis.’

‘I’m just telling you what we’re dealing with here.’

‘I know what we’re dealing with.’

‘Not sure you do.’

‘I was on initial attack.’

‘That’s right. You were.’

‘What’s that—?’

‘Then it got away from you. And now it’s doing what it wants. That’s why we haven’t been able to send a bird back in there.’

‘If you think I’m going to accept that as an excuse for you not doing your job, you’re way off.’

‘I’m not—’

‘There are still
people
in there. And you’re telling me how
unique
this fire is. Like it’s already over and there’s nothing to do but explain why we couldn’t have done more.’

Parks looks over his shoulder and notices a dozen evacuees staring at them. The optics on an exchange of this kind leave something to be desired. He’d taken a professional development course in Vancouver at the start of the season entitled Controlling the On-Site Public Relations Environment. So far, his handling of Miles McEwan would have gotten him a flunking grade.

There’s nowhere for Parks to go but around the back of his truck. Miles follows him. Parks would ask him to sit in the cab, but he isn’t so sure he wants to be in closed quarters with the Ross River crew chief at the moment. A growing number of onlookers still watch them through the truck’s windows, but now that they’re on the other side, Parks hopes they can’t hear what they say.

‘We’re doing everything we can short of endangering our own men.’

‘Don’t you think Mungo Capoose is already in danger? Last time I checked, he was one of our men too. Unless Indians count for less down at head office.’

‘I’m not listening to this shit.’

‘You don’t have to. I’m going back over that hill and finishing the evacuation myself.’

For a second, Miles is gratified to see real shock take hold of Parks’s face.

‘You’re not going in there alone.’

‘Then come with me.’

‘The spotter planes are telling us it’s a firewall between here and there. You’re just being stupid if you do this.’

‘Call me stupid. Think of the satisfaction,’ Miles says, turning to go.

‘We’re investigating this one!’

It’s enough to make Miles pause.

‘Investigating what?’

‘The
cause.
You called it in as unknown. But there’s a whiff of bullshit to that, you have to admit. For one thing, there hasn’t been a lightning strike at the site of the fire’s origin for over fifteen days.’

‘Don’t imply, Dennis. I don’t have time.’

‘This fire was
started.
’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Everything, if you did it.’

‘So fire me.’

‘You’re not following. It’s a hell of a lot bigger than your job now.’

Miles takes a step forward.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A crew working the northern line found your friend Ruby.’

‘Where is she? They bring her here?’

‘Nothing to bring. But she was a tougher lady than I would have guessed, I’ll say that. Made it about ten miles from her tower on foot before the fire chased her down. Know what else? When they found her she still had that book of hers with her.’

‘No…’

‘Holding it like a baby against her chest. The guys tried to pry it out of her hands but it turned to snow.’

‘No.’

‘The Mounties have been itching to start up a homicide investigation right from the start, and now they’ve got it. And by the time this is over, there’s probably going to be a few other bodies to join Ruby’s. You okay, Miles? You’ve gone all white. That’s interesting. Because I wouldn’t imagine an innocent man would look so—’

Miles lunges at Parks so fast the man doesn’t have time to remove the grin from his face. His back slams against the truck’s passenger door. It shatters the glass with a single crunch. Miles’s palms pinned against his shoulders, holding him there.

‘Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,’ Miles spits at him, then steps away, leaving Parks free to
come at him. But he only feels his hands around his back to check where the glass has pierced his shirt.

‘I think your phone is ringing,’ Miles says.

Parks reflexively looks down at his belt and pulls out the satellite phone attached to it, flips the lid and reads its blank screen. By the time he looks up again, Miles is already walking away.

‘You know why you got scars all over that face of yours?’

Miles only lengthens his stride. It forces Parks to scream.

‘Because you’re reckless. You’ve already gotten one man killed. Now you want to kill yourself so you can go down looking like some dumbshit cowboy. You know what? While you’re at it, why don’t you take along your—’

Miles pulls back the flap into the outfitting tent, and when it falls into place behind him it blocks out the director’s words. There’s a table piled with cardboard boxes, food tins, batteries. On the ground, clean pulaskis and pisstanks. He grabs only the most essential supplies he can find—a gorp mix of nuts and raisins, bottles of water, half a dozen Hershey bars—and stuffs them into a pack hanging on a hook. There would be a rifle in the locker, too, but he would need Parks to give him the key. Besides, Miles figures his only chance of making it through the fire now is to run it light.

When he’s got the pack over his shoulders he walks across the open circle of the camp, straight back toward the crest the way he’d come. People
watch him go, but he doesn’t turn his head to see who.

‘Miles? Could you hold up a second?’

He turns to see Jerry McCormack running after him, holding something out in one of his hands. More than this, Miles notices how his crewman, usually shy about nothing, avoids meeting his eyes.

‘I’m in kind of a hurry,’ Miles says once Jerry has caught up with him but only stands there, repeatedly clearing his throat.

‘It’s just that I made something. This here. I was hoping you’d take it with you.’

Miles looks down at the thing gripped between Jerry’s fingers. A half-dozen Popsicle sticks tied together in their middles with string so that they form the shape of a star. Their ends stained a pale red.

‘Christ, Jerry. I don’t—’

Miles’s crewman silences him by revealing the long string connected to the centre of the Popsicle sticks. Then he steps forward and loops it over Miles’s head.

‘They call it a
shutch,
’ Jerry says, still not looking directly at Miles. The strangeness of the exchange is not the only thing that’s made Jerry awkward. It’s that he can’t stop watching the fire working its way over the hills in the distance.

‘Are you serious?’ Miles asks, and is sorry even before it’s out. Jerry’s face clearly shows he’s being about as serious as he’s ever been.

‘I don’t know much about it, really. But back
when my people still did the traditional things, the shaman would take a
shutch
with him when he went into the bush. They say it carries the spirit of a bear. And when you wear it, you can pass through fire. I even saw it once when I was a kid. An eighty-year-old medicine man walking over live coals like it was shag carpet.’

‘Well, well. Something like that could come in handy,’ Miles says, fingering the Popsicle sticks against his shirt and feeling their rounded ends, still wet.

‘It’s supposed to be a bundle of twigs that’s been dipped in the blood of a bear’s tongue,’ Jerry McCormack says, shrugging. ‘Well, you know me, the guy who’s always forgetting to bring his bear’s tongue along. So I asked the cook over in the canteen if I could dip it in the blood left from some steaks he had thawing out on his cutting board. Looked at me like the crazy Indian I am, but he let me do it.’

Uncertain what to say to this, Miles shakes Jerry’s hand. A firm grip signalling agreement, a fair deal struck. The best that two men in a bad spot can do.

Miles carries on out of the camp and is soon walking under the speckled shade of trees once more. He thinks he can hear Dennis Parks, as well as maybe some others. Trying to pull him back with reason, prudence, a dose of sensible fear. Their voices no more sway him than the squawks of the raven following overhead.

If he had only kept moving it might not have happened. All he had to do was stay in the bristling present and he would have been fine. Instead, he makes the mistake of stopping. It’s only for a second, but it’s long enough to open the smallest crack and let the firestarter in.

It is the touch of the lighter that does it. A hand absently slipped into his breast pocket. Before he knows what he’s doing he has pulled the silver casing out to sit face up in his palm, so that when he looks down, the New York skyline winks back at him.

He watches the rising pillars of smoke and asks a question of himself that he instantly recognizes as borrowed. A line from one of those ‘classic’ rebroadcasts on late-night TV. Before his time. Something with POWs, British accents. A tragic misinterpretation of duty.

What have I done?

The thing is, he knows.

For the briefest of moments, the firestarter feels the urge to lay out the arc of his intentions to another, if not confess outright. Who would he go to first to be understood? The answer surprises him. It slips him out of his firestarter self and, for a moment, he is caught in between, disembodied.

He sees himself from outside his skin. A lostlooking man holding a lighter etched with a city he has never been to.

He has heard that, for some, the northern lights will sing. As he walks back up the St Cyrs, Miles strains to hear them. If the light is capable of music, it refuses to play for him tonight. It offers strange company, nevertheless. He watches the aurora’s thrashing and coiling and sees it as torn ribbons of thought. Light without shape, unless it is the shape of dreams. Sun dust. He knows this is what causes the sky to dance. Ions borne for years on the solar wind to fall against the atmosphere seventy miles above him. They will come no closer than this. Yet there is something in the way the wavering sheets stretch earthward that makes him think he might be able to tug them down if he climbed even the stubbiest tree.

Sometime after midnight the sky dulls, blackens, lifts its surface of stars to its usual unthinkable distance. The moon a flashlight searching for him through the trees. In the clearings, it is bright enough that he can see his breath.

For the first few miles, the cold air cleans his mind of voices. Now that they’re gone, he realizes he’s been listening to maybe a dozen ongoing monologues ever since he started into the bush after Margot and Elsie Bader the morning before. Miles is more than glad to have them shut up. Trouble is, the drop in temperature comes with a price. The muscles in his legs, his arms, the ones in charge of holding his head on its neck, have stiffened into wires. He feels poorly assembled.

Even as he’s falling, he tells himself he’s only lying down for a nap. His skull just misses the white rocks poking up all over the hillside and he pretends he planned it that way.

He has brought no blanket, and his firepack is without even one of the standard-issue paper sleeping bags used by crews who have to spend nights on mop-up assignments. He’s forced to sleep where he’s dropped. Coyote camping.

Through the night, Miles lets the mosquitoes land on his face. Yet his stillness seems to discourage the bugs from their feast, as though his flesh is less appetizing without the struggle of resistance. He dozes in snatches so brief that coming out of them causes him pain. There is always a distant howl, a thud, a snort of animal disgust to lift his head from the ground. The earth so dry it feels like newspaper clippings under his cheek.

From time to time, the air is flash-fried by the explosion of solitary pines. A million glowing coals on the ground around him are a crimson
mirroring of stars. As a result, his dreams have no floors or ceilings, no discernible up or down.

The first hint of sunlight wakes him for good. He’s reminded of how the arctic hills change colour through the day. In the moments before dawn, they emerge as an improvised line. Now, they are a sterilized green. Later they will sharpen further yet, the hoodoos a line of tortoise shells. In the evening, he will have climbed into their blues. It occurs to him that he might never see these transformations again.

After a breakfast of chocolate eaten as he walks, Miles comes upon a narrow creek. He watches it run, clear as gin. It commands him to cup his hands and drink. His mouth fills with frosted steel and juniper. He peers back along the course of the creek and sees how it has passed under the boughs of pines that, over the warm afternoons, have dripped traces of resin to flavour the stream.

He rounds a small pond in the shadow of an unnamed peak and sees a crosshatching of moose tracks a foot below the surface. Farther on, he turns to the right where there was nothing before and a great buck looks back at him. It cocks its antlered head as though puzzling as to how Miles appeared out of nowhere, just as Miles wonders the same about it. He expects it to plow into the bush as he has seen them do a thousand times. But this one stays where he is. Lowers his head and drinks, having made some instant assessment that has determined Miles as less of a threat than thirst.

As he walks on, Miles notices how the animals visit him without fear. He’s heard that fire can do this. The detection of smoke has tamed wildlife that would otherwise refuse to be seen by human eyes. Today, the peace has been extended to Miles, an unarmed man walking alone, and therefore in as much trouble as any other living thing. A pair of magpies twitter advice and fly ahead from limb to limb as though blazing a trail on his behalf. The raven stays with him too. Its caws and gulps a self-amusing performance.

More frequently now he feels the presence of something else just behind him, or just ahead. Not the raven. Something that moves on legs as he does, but more surely. Jumping out of view when he swings round to look. He has heard its breathing over the last several hours.

Along with a new sound. In just these last minutes, he’s certain he heard it clear its throat to speak.

He gauges his fatigue by the fury of memories it allows in. Blinks of colour he recognizes as people or landscapes or sunlit rooms only after they have been replaced with something new, so that he is constantly trying to catch up. The apartment over the bagel bakery in Montreal. The girl’s bug-bitten knees. Alex, mostly. Not her face, but close-up parts he hadn’t consciously thought of since he left. The moles atop the knobs at each end of her collarbone. The incisor that is the last tooth to be
seen before she closes her lips, nipping the flesh each time. Eyelids bruised from sleep.

He works to hold these pictures in place. For as long as they linger before him, he forgets himself and only drifts closer to where he’s going. But then the snapshots slip away and he’s alone again. Unsure if he is being guided or pursued.

For the second time in the last twenty-four hours Miles crosses over the ridge of the St Cyrs, and for the second time he notices it only once it has passed. The valley to the north is too great a distraction. Nothing, not Ross River or the Pelly or the contour of the basin itself, is visible for the fire. As he descends, it appears to race to meet him, the spits of flame reaching from every direction. If he could see a clear way through, it would be from up here. Instead, there is only a panorama of the valley’s destruction.

Even before he reaches the fireline, the air is burdened with heat. The going is maddeningly slow. His boots send hollow knocks through the earth, as though he is walking on bare planks. More than anything it is the sun that weighs upon his limbs, masked in the curls of grey.

His exhaustion allows the worst thoughts to pass without the dread that would otherwise accompany them. He will burn in this fire. Alex and Rachel will burn. The pain the child will endure.

Miles can thank his mother for his ability to come up with the worst of these scenarios. For
the second half of her life, she has lived for the narratives of everyday tragedy. Savage divorces, crib deaths, bright youths turned instant quadriplegics from dives into shallow water. The young Miles was brought up on the saddest gossip Nanaimo had to offer. He had always assumed it was her way of interpreting his father’s leaving her. A terrible thing had happened in her life, and she sought some comfort in observing that she was not alone in being visited by terrible things.

At the time, it struck neither of them as a morbid preoccupation. As with jokes, it all turns upon the telling. Miles’s mother made a point of relating her reports of misfortune with genuine sympathy and, more important, the promise of a lesson to be learned. Only now, winding his way down into the fire-filled Tintina Trench, does Miles recognize what this lesson was. All through his childhood she had been trying to tell him that the true price one pays for love isn’t the possibility of heartbreak but its certainty.

When he comes to the fire Miles stalks its borders, searching for a way through. It appears that no entry point is better than any other. He knows that at the heart of a fire of the Comeback’s size it would be hot enough to melt gold. Even trees of the subarctic’s stature shoot flames a hundred feet skyward, and smoke three times higher yet. The fire gives every sign that its purpose is to drive all life out of its path. And he’s looking for a way in.

The raven flies in a tight circle above a patch of disparate flames, the space between their red columns little more than double the width of his shoulders. For the first time since Miles noticed it following him, the black bird is silent.

There is no time to consider whether the trickster, in its quiet, is offering help or malice. Its intent can’t be known in any case. Miles must move forward or allow the remaining channels into the fire to close forever.

He cuts around to the raven’s position and strides between the flames. His fingers play over the
shutch
on his chest. He wonders whether his skin or the Popsicle sticks will burn first.

Wade walks through his own fire. Though it’s all around him, he can only really feel its heat through the rifle’s metal, the barrel searing the palm of his good hand. It’s like he’s already shot the things he most looks forward to shooting.

As he clumps farther into the trees, he replays the day just a few weeks ago when Margot had taken the truck down to Whitehorse. All she told him was that she was going to keep an appointment, though he knew what this meant, the decision that announced itself in the zipping of her overnight bag down the hall as he sat staring at the moisture stains in the living-room ceiling. He didn’t try to stop her. When he got back from the Welcome Inn later that night he’d plugged a cartridge into his shotgun and walked round to Miles’s cabin.

Later, after Jerry and Crookedhead had interrupted him, after he’d found a strange, near-sober calm after killing the dog who’d stood in his way, Wade had made it home, dropped the Mossberg on the sofa, and dialled the number to the motel where Margot was staying. He’d apologized. Two or three times in a row. Not for anything he’d done or not done, but for being who he was. It was more like saying goodbye.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘Because I am.’

‘You sound weird.’

‘I tried to kill him.’

‘Who?’

‘Playing with himself. I mean, playing
chess
against—’

‘Go to bed.’

‘But I’m not tired. I’m so awake it’s got my goddamn head split open.
Ideas.
I got ideas right now that you would never—’

‘It’s gone.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s gone, Wade.’

A foul twist in his guts. The final voiding of whatever had held him to his routine of muttering barefoot around the trailer during the day, scoffing at the contestants on reality TV shows, getting methodically drunk within an hour of his stomach settling from the abuses of the night before—the fading outline of a life. Now even this was gone.
That’s what he’d heard in Margot’s words. Not her refusal to carry his child, but her refusal of
him.

What filled him in its place wasn’t rage—not at first—but terror. Even he had never been truly alone before. He had been born without the gift for friendship, and before Margot, women seemed to discover something in him in the early going that warned them off. Yet even with these handicaps, his self-defeating habits, Wade Fuerst had always had someone to sit across from, whether a fellow crewman in an oil field mess hall, or his parents, or Margot. There would be no one now, though, and he was afraid.

He might have stayed in his fear, booze-addled and harmless, were it not for Miles. It wasn’t his affair with Margot that struck him as unjust, but the fact that he had turned down what Wade would have given anything to accept. A family. Offered to Miles not once, not twice, but three times, the third just last week, when the same green-eyed woman and little girl he’d run from came to the end of the world to present themselves to him. To Miles McEwan, the only bastard he could say for sure was no better than him. This was what Wade found intolerable. It was beyond unfair. It was
wrong.

Wade walks down into the valley with the fire, quicker than he, on each side. A moment ago he might have turned around and had a chance of escaping it. Not that he wanted to. He’s past even
thinking about getting out now, of fixing things.

That’s the bitch about last chances. You never know that’s what they were until they’re gone.

For a long while, Miles isn’t sure if he’s alive or dead. He studies the hands of his watch, but they hold no meaning. He’s lost the ability to read time as well as anything else, all of his language pulled away, leaving him erased and dumb. The black hands of the timepiece stare up at him, making some repeated point he hasn’t the faculties to understand.

Inches from the tip of his boots, a marmot leaps out of the flames. The creature takes a last blinking look at the sun, at Miles, before running blind back into the orange grass.

Crispy critters.

This is what every fire crew he’s worked on calls animals burned in wildfires. It’s only funny, Miles realizes, when you’re walking through a safe zone after it’s all over, kicking at the hollow dead things that lie in the ash. Even then, it’s a nervous laughter.

Inside, the smoke is the colour of an old penny. For the moment, the fire keeps to the crowns of trees. The flashes from the canopy above show through like sheet lightning. When the flames work their way down the trunks he will be there waiting for it. Glowing cinders land on his tongue.

Up close, fire sounds like rain. The scalding drops rip cigarette holes through his shirt. Soon
there is more exposed skin than cotton to cover it.

He stops for a drink but spits it out before it reaches the back of his throat. His mouth tastes sick. An itchy coating over his gums that no amount of horking can get rid of. It makes him think that he’s eaten a rotten salad, milky and rust stained. He picks his teeth for lettuce that isn’t there.

When he starts again the burned kid walks next to him. Although he doesn’t turn to look directly into his face, Miles can feel him there. A frigid aura finding its way through the heat.

‘Why don’t you turn into a bird again and fly the fuck off,’ Miles says, but his voice cracks, and the threat breaks into a whimper.

The kid steps closer. Licks his lips as though to whisper words directly into Miles’s skull.

‘No! You can’t speak! I won’t
let
you speak!’ Miles nearly sobs, spinning around to throw closed fists at where the kid would be standing. Although he makes contact with nothing, he won’t let himself look to see what’s there.