How to Find Peace at the End of the World (14 page)

I get back in the truck and Charley covers my faces with a second skin of dog saliva. I say “Well boy, into Hell we ride.” I put the Beast into gear and gun it towards the scrim of smoke. 

As he has become used to doing by now, Charley looks at me and does that open mouthed turn of the head and a little whine, pinched up at the end: Are you insane?

I pat his lopsided head and push the truck through the thick smoke, hoping that my pre-emptive measures, the cloth and plastic over all the vents and sandwiched in the doors will keep the cab from filling up. My optimism proves unfounded and soon we’re all coughing our lungs out. My eyes tear up and it becomes even harder to see, but I continue on because stopping will most certainly mean death for us both. I’ve got the car in the grass but hug the very edge of the shoulder and the asphalt grinding against the very edge of the tire is the only re-assurance I have that we’re not veering into deeper smoke and fire. The smoke inside the cab grows so thick I’m starting to have trouble seeing my own hands on the wheel.
My wits returned to me I understand the gravity of the situation and I drop my lead foot on the pedal. The headlamps and big spotlights angled down from the roof hardly shine a few feet in front of the pickup but there’s no lingering in this Hell. I have to almost rely on innate instinct, or so I like to think, and I swerve here and there, not even knowing if I’m dodging anything at all or if next moment I’ll smack into a big wreck and send myself flying through the windshield.
I’m going at a good clip for a while and then it comes into my head that I’ve been going straight without having to juke for far too long, and at the last second I jerk the wheel right and barely miss a big overturned car carrier. I shiver as the shape looms past us like some hulk floating in deep space or drifting at the bottom of the ocean. Charley barks in surprise and climbs up high on his front limbs.

I can’t see anything and I’m quickly getting light headed. I judge there’s as much smoke in the cab as there is outside and I’m holding my breath for long moments at a time and things are starting to seem distant, surreal, and I know it’s oxygen deprivation, but I can’t help it: I’ll still hold my breath because I don’t want the smoke to cause permanent oxygen deprivation. And I can feel eventually my connection to the world slipping past and I begin to take in and cough on shallow gulps of smoke. My hands begin to jerk and then loosen on the wheel and everything seems just about to slip out of my control when all of a sudden the light floods into the cab, blades of sun sluicing through the thick, dark curls of smoke. My hand scrambles for the window controls and my fingers find them, all of them and all four windows of the cab are coming down and the speed of the truck, the clean air rushing past is whipping all of the smoke out and clean air is coming in. God. God yes.
 

??????  I’m lying on the hood of the truck and the metal, hot from sun, is about to burn my skin. It feels good. I feel possibly…more than I’ve ever felt at this moment. It’s cliché but more alive than I’ve ever felt. More better. That’s what this whole post apocalypse thing has felt like. Funny, right? Funny. I am directly in the middle of two large brushfires separates by many miles and the wind is whipping to and fro, alternately leaning the shelf of smoke this way and that, threatening one moment to topple it over us and the other moment to topple it away. We are at the mercy of pissed off God. We are in the middle of a tornadic column of fire. And here I am resting on the hood, the hot slab of the hood of the Beast under me, nearly scalding, and it feels good. Why? The head of Charley barely peeks over the edge of the hood. Sometimes he’ll put his front paws up and lick at my hand. Time to go, he’s saying. The wet of his tongue cools in the whipping wind. The heat from the hood. I’m alive. I’m feeling this. The last of the smoky lethargy leaves my lungs. I sit up. “We’re ALIVE Charley.”

“Ruff.”

Time to get going.

4:15 PM

I see a little path that takes me to the side opposite where the main fires look to be. I veer on to it.

I can’t stay on the road with the smoke like this. I try to drive at a tack almost perpendicular to the highway, hoping that this will take me far enough away from the smoke so that I can continue on in a northward direction.

I look overhead and see a mass of birds wheel out from under the smoke in the distance. I see the sun lowering across the sky in the slight west. So that must be North then. In my headlong rush I can’t be fucking bothered to check the compass on my phone, my GPS. Gotta hurry. I turn towards what’s supposed to be North even though it edges the great shawl of smoke again over half the sky. I’m aiming for that clear slice ahead. That must be North enough. Dallas. Amy. We’re coming for you.

North is North most like but soon I know something is wrong. The great dark shawl is spreading, drawing over the remainder of the sky. It looks apocalyptic, God drawing the curtain down on all he’d ever made.

Suddenly I’m falling. I realize my error, possibly fatal. The fire wasn’t on the other side of the highway. It was on this one. Some bend or some curve gave that illusion. Or it’s jumped. Now there’s fire before me. I look back. There’s fire behind. The wind is unhelpful now in telling me which way it’s coming. It must be coming both ways because either way I look it looks to be getting closer.

I look back in the direction of the last marker on the rutted road, then back in the direction of the rutted road to the Freeway. Maybe I can make it back to the Freeway. It should be safe there right?

I stop the Beast and squint into the distance. How far could it be? Is it really that much closer? Maybe the wind will change and it’ll burn itself out. Maybe.

I make to get out. Then I stop myself. What good would that do? I start the Beast up again and turn it around towards the marker on the rutted road. I begin taking the rutted road back towards the Freeway. I stop as I reach the farm road to turn back onto the freeway. Back west, back towards the main road there is only black sky. It seems almost as if the two columns of fire have converged there and colluded to make it darker than midnight except for where the fire flares near the horizon. The other way is still a chance, a subtle reflection of light from the sun that’s setting in the opposite direction. And the road, the road might lead to something like a natural feature that we could take shelter in.

I think back to everything I passed on the farm road. There must be some break in the grass I can use. I think of creeks and drainage ditches. Long corrugated tubes of metal full of water. Levies and lakes. Did I pass any of that on the way out here?

Hope or a known quantity? The freeway was smoky but I could deal with it. I could pass it. But then, just barely, right? Who knows really? Conditions may have changed. Then, there’s no guarantee I’ll find anything but dry grass for miles down the other way and a wildfire is no joke. But I could probably outrun it in the Beast. I don’t know why but I turn back towards the freeway, towards that angry orange and black wall. Why? What the hell am I doing I ask myself many times.

I try to assuage myself. I’d seen something back there. Something that can help me. Help us get through this. Some sign that had indicated a reservoir or lake or something. Gotta find out what it is. I gotta go back, right?

What the hell am I doing? I put on the brakes. I sit there idling the Beast and try to convince myself that this is stupid. The ultimate stupidity. I turn the other way. What was I doing? I laugh to myself. Laughing jogs something in my head. Something about satellites and solar panels and receivers. GPS. GPS. The book said GPS would work for years afterwards.

I turn on the GPS. It tells me it’s acquiring signal. I wait. It tells me acquiring signal. I get impatient and start driving away from the highway again. Five minutes later it finds something and shows me a map. Brilliant. I’m in the middle of a blank field. Uncharted. Unmapped. I sit there and zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Scroll. Zoom.

Then there it is. There just north of me. A reservoir. I look to the angry, boiling horizon and wonder if the fire has gotten there already. If the fire is between me and the reservoir…I map the distance to it. Three miles. I look up at the horizon. The fire doesn’t seem that far away.

I have to leave the freeway, put some more distance in between me and it. I can turn north again. Fuck. I should have just stayed going north before. Lost time. All that lost time.

I turn north immediately, into the tall grass ahead of me. In my mind each second delayed might mean the difference between finding water and finding a wall of fire before me. I rub at my forehead, the sweat coming off it like I’m in the midst of it already. I go until I can go no more. It can’t be more than a thousand feet before me, and there’s no water to be seen. I check the GPS. I’m still a mile away. I back up and head towards the other shawl of smoke and stop when I’m in the midst of dark sky. The fire seems to be coming on in three directions now.

BookMark

It’s the worst feeling in the world, your own doom creeping towards you in slow motion. You sit there and tell yourself…if you’d just a little faster, a little more deliberate with your movements, little less wishy washy, you could have made it. You would have been all right.

The first strands of smoke reach me. Arcing cinders begin settling in the grass all around, touching fires here in there within a few hundred feet around us. The wind picks up and fans them into bigger fires amidst the alternating patches of dry grass and green strands.

Charley whimpers.

It seems only a moment ago, resting, things seemed so hopeful. And now I’m actually in Hell. Sitting in the middle of Hell.

What now? Just lie down and give up then? Charley’s whine pitches up at me as if he’s imploring me to come up with something else. Anything.
How do I save my truck? How do I save us?

My mind scrambles for the unlikely, the ridiculous. I could make a fire break like in a movie I saw once. Always like in a movie I saw once. But there’s no time. Light a stick and run back and light the dry grass. Then what? Where would I find something to light? A stick. I go for a stick and some cloth. No. Gasoline. That might be better.

I take a few tent poles bundled together and tear the quilt that I’d had in the back and wrap it around the metal. Then I douse the shreds of fabric with some gasoline and light it. Bingo, a pretty good torch. I take the torch and touch tip to the dry grass downwind, running in a line perpendicular to the wind. The drought dry grass catches quickly and I chuckle nervously to myself as I run down the field: I’ve never done something like this. How am I even still alive? The closest I’ve been to playing with fire like this is watching some obscure movie in the 80s about African Tribesman. This is insane.
It turns out better than I expect, the wind catches and combs up the fire and I’m delighted by how well it works. In a few minutes I have a patch of burn about five hundred feet long and almost as much across and growing by the second.
Through the cracked truck window I can hear Charley begin to bark at me. We’re celebrating. Yeah! I am the fucking fire bearer. Charley continues barking and somehow I pick out something, call me crazy, a note, a tone to it. I whip around to a scene that makes my chest collapse. The wind, however subtly has, as greatly feared, shifted, has a slightly southern component now and my line is whipping down. I stick my finger in my mouth and wet it and stick it up into the air. Useless because I don’t know what the fuck those African tribesmen were doing. The wind could be fixing to change. I have to move fast, back to the Beast, so that I can move it into the cleared area.
Right then, just as I’m moving back, is when some devil or even the god that’s left me behind chooses to sneer down at me. The wind turns back over on itself sharply and I get a face full of blinding smoke and heat. My lungs burn with the dry singed air. It gets so hot that I’m forced on the ground. I cover my hair with my hands and feel even the skin on the back of my hand begin to peel. The wind eases and shifts a little more and allows me a measure of freedom. I hear Charley barking at me madly. I look up and squint at the truck and make out the form of the truck surrounded by patches of fire. The constantly shifting wind plays with it, the flames surging and withdrawing and surging. Charley! I force myself back on my feet. The wind surges again and the fire nearest to the truck edges towards it. I move slowly, testing where the heat is bearable. Sometimes it gets so close even that I can feel it through my thick clothes against my adrenaline dulled skin. I click on the key fob to unlock the doors. I run past the cab of the truck in which Charley is barking his head off to the back of the bed. I’m already choking and light headed. I grab the thick canvas tarp and comforter and also the handle of the duffel and drag them out of the truck bed. I wrench my shoulder on realizing I’d put a few more 12 packs of water in it when I first got back on the truck after camping out. I scream at the strain on my shoulder and then stumble up to the passenger door to throw it open. No time, no time to get in the driver seat and move the damn thing. Dammit. When I open the side door Charley comes bounding out, barking, circling my legs. All I can think to do in the hazy confusion is to lead him towards the burn of grass that I’d made and hope that it’s large enough. I throw the comforter on the ground and grab a 12 pack of water I’d been dragging around inside of the canvas bag and with the combat knife empty the whole honeycomb of water over the comforter. I take both the canvas and comforter and mold it into a shell, the heat and air already at a choking magnitude as I force Charley under the blanket and then crawl under myself.
The roar of the fire becomes even more deafening than it had been and I can hear and feel the sizzling and cracking. I hope that the comforter does not dry out and catch fire. God, I hope. I bring Charley in closer. It’s getting awful hot. I’ve got two bottle of water unopened and I open one of them and douse Charley’s fur some more and he tries to lap up the flow of water as I pour. I open the other bottle and I have to take a sip to quench my mounting thirst and then give Charley a sip and save the rest. I douse a separate scrap of fabric and alternately hold it over my nose and Charley’s, though he doesn’t understand and tries to nuzzle my hand away. It’s the only way I can take a breath without choking.