The Wildfire Season (3 page)

‘Stump?’ She swallows, as though tasting the name. ‘Grumpy lump! Let’s see Stump!’

Miles leads them past the prefab utility shed that once housed the radio station but now stands locked, the hastily painted CHRV-FM 88.9 sign over the door peeling away in rolls, the transmitting antenna bent to the side from kids using the shed as an observation tower.

‘Can we hear it? On the radio in the truck?’ Rachel asks him. No longer rushing ahead, the girl now lingers twenty feet behind Miles and Alex, kicking at stones that nip the backs of their ankles.

‘They’ve closed it down.’

‘But when it
did
work, who talked on it?’

‘Anybody that wanted to.’

‘So if it worked now, could I go on and talk?’

‘There wouldn’t be anybody to stop you.’

Now that he thinks of it, Miles misses tuning in during his first year here, finding only static most of the time, but also unexpected treats. Bonnie reading from her grandmother’s recipe box. Mungo playing the same side of Johnny Cash’s
Ring of Fire
LP three times in a row. A bunch of preschoolers giggling for a half-hour straight. All of it reaching no farther than a two-mile radius of wilderness and perhaps a half-dozen others who may have been listening. There was a comfort in it, though. Sitting alone and having voices come to him. Confirming for whoever might be doing the talking or listening that they were here, together, even if what was being said and heard made no trace of difference in the world.

As they walk toward his cabin, Miles and Alex ask questions of each other for the girl’s sake—Had Alex taken Rachel to see the dancing Gertie Girls in Dawson? Does Miles get a chance to go south in the winters?—but most of what passes between them comes in versions of the unsaid. No matter what caution they bring to their words, everything delivers both of them to the life they had discovered together, no greater in length than the time they have now been apart. They remember in the silence of shared understanding, two listeners tuned to the same voice. One that tells a story they already know but that surprises them anyway, leading them from what they had to what they lost, to Miles running away, to fire.

An afternoon rain has forced it underground. It hides beneath the surface, gnawing along roots far enough down to be untouched by moisture. The fire can find any number of hosts without ever showing itself to the world, living in oil shales, petroleum seeps or coal veins for weeks, even years. For now, tiny and unnamed, it allows itself to sleep.

A stethoscope placed on the ground would hear nothing, but a cheek could feel its warmth. In land like this, there may be a hundred such lazy fires for every square mile, more on the edges of swamps and bogs, where the fuels are rich but lie deeper. Most never awaken. They come to the end of whatever nourishes them and slowly suffocate,
without a struggle, their hearts weak from birth. But this one is different. It was born with intent.

There. A white puff tails up from below, as though exhaled from an underworld cigarette. Another. Soon the smoke becomes a steady stream, broadening, clinging to the deadfall like morning fog.

Before it is extinguished, it will claim a land area greater than most national parks, leaving a lake of ash behind. It will turn bones to swan feathers. It will kill, and hide the bodies better than the most calculating assassin.

It will do all of this as though motivated by some idea of itself, by ambition, by hate. But as with all fires, it will have no desire but to live.

Why Miles?

Alex has wondered this perhaps more than anything else. Why had she decided to shed all her shyness for that one sun-glowy, blue-eyed boy over all the others? Why
him
, sitting alone on the back fire escape of a Montreal walk-up at the first party of the new term, the weeks ahead of her fizzing with possibility, never mind the next year, the next five?

Sometimes she’s sure it was his mouth that made her step out onto the fire escape on her own. Her housemate, Jen, a boy-crazy psych major from Massachusetts who liked to regard Alex as ‘
so
Canadian’ (which meant, for her, an innocent who didn’t stand a chance in the corrupt negotiations of sex), had asked where she was going when Alex had left her chatting up a pair of sniggering frat boys in the bathroom lineup, and Alex had told her, ‘I’m sure you can handle Beavis and Butthead on your own,’ and walked out into the cool night.
It was his mouth that did it, she’s almost certain. His lips fine but deeply coloured, a mark of delicate youth on a face she would have otherwise thought of as broad featured, even rough. She saw him through the kitchen window, noticed his mouth and wanted to kiss it, as she had wanted before, daydreamingly, of others’. What was remarkable about this boy’s lips was that she wanted to kiss them first and then divide them with her tongue, slitting them apart as a blade opens an envelope, so that she could see what shape they’d make around his words.

‘Have you ever tried to eat the stars?’

Alex is literally taken off balance. It’s the heels she borrowed from Jen’s endless collection jamming through the metal slats as much as his question.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough.’

‘When I was a kid I would pick them right out of the sky. They had a taste, too.’

‘Were they good?’

‘Oh yeah.
Too
good. My mom told me if I ate too many I’d start to shine.’

Only now does Miles look at her directly, and Alex thinks that it’s too late. This boy has already had more than his fill of stars.

Miles pulls a clear plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and shakes it in the air. Inside, a cluster of withered caps and stems leap over each other as though in an effort to escape.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mushrooms,’ he says. ‘I spent the summer out on Vancouver Island. Picked these lovelies myself. Very friendly.’

‘So, instead of stars, now you eat magic mushrooms.’

‘I’m always putting something in my mouth.’ He shakes the bag again. ‘Want some?’

‘What do they do?’

‘You mean you’ve never—?’

‘No. I’ve never most things.’

‘That’s okay. They basically take whatever mood you’re in and enhance it, make you see beyond what you’d normally see.’

‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Name one.’

‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’

‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’

Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.

But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.

‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.

‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’

‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.

Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and
churrasceira
restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her
feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.

They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.

At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.

‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.

‘And brighter.’

‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’

No, that’s you
, Alex nearly says.

Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds
Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.

‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’

Alex’s apartment is a small 3
¹
/
₂
over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled dough from downstairs.

‘It makes me constantly hungry,’ she says, pouring both of them glasses of ice water. ‘But I love it. So do the mice.’

‘Have you set traps?’

‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live
somewhere
, right?’

‘That’s not ridiculous.’

‘Do you have mice?’

‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In my van.’

‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’

‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’

In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm
wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.

She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.

‘What is that?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That.’

Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.

‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.

‘A
flat
mouse.’

‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and
phwat
!’

‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.

Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.

When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.

Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’

Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.

Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the
practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.

That summer, they sublet the apartment and Miles drove out west for the same job he had worked the past four years, taking a position on a forest firefighting crew in the British Columbia Interior. Alex joined him for the ride as far as Vancouver and found work at an East End daycare. They saw each other as much as they could, Miles coming down to the city on his breaks and Alex taking the eight-hour bus ride to Salmon Arm on Saturdays to spend the night with him before taking the bus back on Sunday morning.

On the return cross-country drive, in a Robin’s Donuts parking lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw, Miles gave Alex a ring he’d won from his foreman in a poker game.

‘It’s collateral,’ he said.

‘You want a loan?’

‘I want your time.’

‘I don’t get it.’

Miles placed his hands against the sides of Alex’s head. She could feel them shaking.

‘Next summer is going to be my last one working the fires. And when I come back, I want to give you something with a real rock in it.’

‘Are you looking for an answer now?’

‘That’s up to you.’

Alex slipped the foreman’s ring on her finger, a silver band with the name ROY on it in raised fool’s gold. She turned it against her knuckle until the metal warmed her skin.

‘It’s not really my style. And it’s way too big,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep it anyway.’

They spoke frankly, always and right from the start, and best when of grave things, confessions, the conveying of bad news. For Miles, this involved the story of his missing father. A chemical engineer at the Nanaimo pulp mill who married Miles’s mother, bought a modest house near the harbour, and on the day before his son’s fifth birthday, left without leaving behind a note, an address, anything to suggest he was ever coming back.

Honesty was never an issue between them. They were truthful out of the need to be together, and plain talk came as naturally to them as desire itself. Before they knew it—and for the first time
in their lives—they were speaking as man and wife.

Miles was accepted to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Alex took a position at the Arrowsmith School for learning disabled children in the same city. Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before the beginning of their new lives together, of true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season.

His name is Tim, but everyone calls him the kid. Every attack team Miles has ever worked on has had a ‘kid’, a nickname automatically assigned to the youngest member of the crew. But this one deserves it. He has the sort of face that is an indisputable foreshadowing of how he would look twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, and how even then, he would still be the kid. Round and shinychinned, his skin so flushed as to be an almost laughable display of good health. At first, Miles told himself to call the boy by his proper name, so that at least one of the crew saw that he was doing a man’s job and deserved to be recognized for it. But by the end of the second week even Miles couldn’t fight the obvious and called him nothing but ‘kid’ from then on.