The Wildfire Season
ANDREW PYPER
For Heidi
He must go far, but not too far. Someplace lightning would choose. A tree that is a foot or two taller than its neighbours, one with a drop sheet of needles around its base. Too much regrowth will only lead to a telltale explosion. On the other hand, there will have to be enough fuel to nurture the smoke, keep it alive while teaching it to go slow. The firestarter had assumed the perfect location would make itself plain once he was out here. Instead, nowhere looks right.
There are moments when he thinks he might be lost. His squinting attention to particular corners of the forest makes his head swim when he lifts it to get his bearings. He has never been afraid in the bush before. Then again, he isn’t himself, is he? Maybe
he
would never become lost so close to where he started, but the
firestarter
might.
Doing this thing, he refuses to think of himself as himself. A split personality, if only for today.
It’s not shame that forces him to hide—he has his reasons for being here, or a set of compulsions anyway, even if he has trouble recalling them now, so occupied is he by the act alone. He is the firestarter and not himself mostly because it makes it easier. A man temporarily free of history, attachments, implications. For now, he’s a soldier on a mission, acting on faith in the wisdom of his orders.
As if folding its arms, the forest blocks his progress. He punches forward, kept on his feet by an elastic web of spruce branches. Once, he gets trapped in a standing coffin of twigs and is forced to hack his way out with his knife. As he thrashes free he hears himself whimper. A sound he doesn’t recognize as any he’s ever made before.
In time, he finds that he stands in a small clearing. Indiscernible from the dozen bald patches he has already passed through and dismissed as unsuitable.
Here.
Later, someone might even figure it out.
It started here.
He snaps the campfire sticks he picked up at the outfitter’s in Carmacks into cubes and drops them randomly, one at a time, as he paces. Will two sticks be enough? He decides three would be better, just to be sure. Then four. He takes the tin of kerosene from his pack and sprays it in spidery lines reaching out from the duff he has raked into a small pile with his hands. He thinks he may
have overdone it a bit but reminds himself that whatever evidence he leaves behind will be turned to ash long before he makes it back to town.
The firestarter plucks the Zippo from his breast pocket. He pauses long enough to stroke his thumb over the illustration etched into its silver plate. A habit. One that is observed every time he holds the lighter in his palm before lifting the same thumb to turn the flint. Over the years, both in his own possession and those of its previous, anonymous owners, the drawing’s lines have been smoothed, the words printed beneath it faded, though still readable.
New York City
. Atop this caption, the Manhattan skyline is rendered from a thousand feet above the island’s south tip, so that the Chrysler Building is a pope’s hat in the distance and, looming in the foreground, the twin towers stand guarding all that lies behind them.
They were gone now, of course. He can’t believe it was nearly four years ago that he watched them collapse into aprons of dust on TV, then wonders what isn’t right about four years, whether it feels longer ago or more recent than that. Not that he’d ever seen them when they were still around. He’d never been to New York in his life. The distance between there and where he is now strikes him as preposterous, science-fictional.
Where had he gotten the Zippo, anyway? A gift, he thinks, or maybe not. He’s not sure who gave it to him if it is. It’s just one of those massproduced souvenirs that make their way around
the world, a cousin in the family of Maid of the Mist pens and Mao alarm clocks, drifting from hand to hand, the original sentiment attached to its purchase long rubbed away.
The firestarter is ready now. All he needs to do is flick the lighter and touch the flame to the accelerants spilled around his boots. Yet, for another moment, he does nothing but study the words and grooves of the Zippo’s face with a pointless intensity. What does he want these familiar hieroglyphs to reveal? Now, after so long spent in his pockets, lying on dresser tops, lost and found in the chasms between sofa pillows?
He’s only waiting for the answer to why he has come here to return. Already, he’s learned that this is the problem with being two people at once. The motivations of one tend to slip away for stretches so that, acting as the other, he finds himself having thoughts he doesn’t know the beginning or end of.
Still, even the intentions of a stranger standing in the woods with a lighter in his hand aren’t difficult to guess.
With one more pass of his thumb over the lines of Manhattan, he starts a fire.
Then he bends to his knees, cups his hands on the ground, and starts another.
Sometimes, Miles McEwan can tell a thing is about to happen before it does. A jar of pickles envisioned falling out of the fridge before the door is opened, and then, in the next instant, he is on his knees, plucking baby dills from the brine on the floor. A phone that rings on the bedside table only after he reaches for the receiver. Eyes shut against lightning a full moment before the flash.
Right now, for instance, he looks at the door across the room and knows it is about to open. When it does, a woman who is barely a memory and a girl he has never seen before will enter. The light behind them will roll out from between their feet to make a carpet of gold over the concrete. Until they step inside, their faces will be too shadowed to reveal any details, but their silhouettes will show that the little girl holds on to the woman’s hand, their two arms linked as a single causeway between the shapes of their bodies.
That’s as far as his premonition goes. No words,
no motion, no gesture showing the way into the what-happens-next. He is aware that such a vision wouldn’t be in the least remarkable if it took place in any other barroom, restaurant or community hall, whatever the Welcome Inn Lounge is the closest to being. But here, it is a rare occurrence for anyone to appear in doorways who Miles doesn’t already know. A place cast so far from the rest of the world that it has no strangers.
Ross River. Better known to those few who have ever heard of it as Lost Liver, on account of the heroic, if mostly cheerless, drinking that goes on. A scattering of storage sheds and slumping log cabins three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, a dot absent from all but the most scrupulous maps. Miles knows where he is. But up here, when he throws his head back to take in the night sky, he feels closer to the dimmest stars than the ground beneath his feet.
He pushes his gaze through the whirring blades of an exhaust fan that does its best to pump out the smoke, the yeasty splatterings, the pine-scented deodorant pucks that only half mask the reek of backed-up sewage. Quarter to eleven and still light outside. He squints to see as far as he can. Over the rusting tin roofs of the road-maintenance building and the padlocked radio station, past the yearning faces of TV satellite dishes atop the long-immobilized mobile homes, to the huddled green domes of the St Cyr range that cuts all of them off from the rest of the Territory, the country, the continent.
A woman and child are about to open the door across the room. What troubles him is that he’s more certain of an event that has yet to occur than the past that has brought him here.
‘Miles?’
As the Welcome Inn’s bartender, concierge and night cook, it is Bonnie’s job to stick her hand into the beer fridge, toss keys to any guests who might be staying in one of the lopsided rooms out back, and slam the microwave door shut behind frozen mini-pizzas. As a rule, Miles never sits with others at one of the tables. It leaves him alone to watch Bonnie slide her elbows toward him, her face hovering close enough for him to glimpse the remaining caramel-coated molars in her smiling mouth and take in a whiff of the photo-developing fluid that is in fact the conditioner she uses to prolong the life of her perm. He nods and absently lifts his hand to trace the scars down the right side of his face. Furious striations broad and deep enough to fit whole fingertips into.
‘Thanks,’ Miles says, and feels Bonnie clink another bottle against the two others in front of him. She maintains the habit of not collecting empties until closing time so that, as the night goes on, the patrons display scorecards on their tables.
Miles looks around and does a quick tally on who’s winning so far this evening. Mungo Capoose. Sharing a table with the younger guys, Jerry McCormack and Crookedhead James. Along with Miles, they constitute four-fifths of the Ross
River forest firefighting crew. Mungo, Jerry and Crookedhead, along with the absent King, are his ‘attack team’, though by the look of them, all they’re fit to attack is a tray of tequila shots followed by the pillows in their beds.
‘Where’s King?’ Miles asks Mungo. The old man who is not as old as he looks lifts his head slowly, as though pulling his attention away from an intriguing calculation involving the slivers in the plywood next to his hands.
‘Working the radio.’
‘Do me a favour? Go check on him when you’re done that beer.’
‘You sending me out on a wake-up call?’
‘I wouldn’t trust anybody else.’
Miles would check on King himself except, the truth is, he’s not crazy about being alone around the kid. He would rather not have to let King give him that look of his, the hooded stare that seems to be focused at a point slightly higher than the eyes. It makes Miles think the kid is reading a signed confession nailed to his forehead.
‘Hear they got a smoker up near Dawson,’ Jerry says. He has just lit his cigarette and stares at the open lighter in his hand as though its flame has informed him of larger blazes elsewhere.
‘That’s right,’ Miles answers.
‘Big?’
‘Not too big.’
‘Will it get their crew a renewal?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Big enough, then.’
‘What do you think?’ Crookedhead James asks Miles. ‘We going to get our own smoke to bury anytime soon?’
‘Maybe King is getting coordinates from a spotter right now.’
‘I’m almost done,’ Mungo says, taking the hint. ‘I just hate leaving a bottle with something in it.’
Mungo says this in the same fateful tone that Miles remembers him using when asked why people in Ross River possess such a thirst. ‘It’s not that there’s nothing to do but drink,’ Mungo clarified. ‘It’s that there’s nothing
better
to do but drink.’
Aside from jobs on the attack team and a handful of come-and-go government positions, the men in town have little opportunity for employment. Some describe themselves as hunting guides, but Margot Lemontagne is the only one who makes her living at it. Margot and Wade Fuerst run Ross River’s one registered guiding business, catering to the occasional hunters from Outside who come in search of moose, Dall sheep and, most prized of all, the last of the giant inland grizzly bears on the planet. It is also generally admitted that she is the best tracker in town. This praise would be surprising if only because Margot is a woman but is even more remarkable when that woman is thirty-two, and a Métis without any local Kaska relations.
Although he sits outside her peripheral vision, she feels Miles’s eyes on her and abruptly turns
to face him. She neither laughs nor smiles, but to Miles the effect is as if she had. Her brown eyes lively. The brows pulled high in mock surprise.
It’s looks like this—semi-secret, girlish, vaguely flirtatious—that Wade feels he doesn’t get as many of as he used to. They are also expressions he finds increasingly hard to tolerate Margot’s offering other men, especially Miles. Soon after he arrived in town, alone, and with that scar glowing down his face that both threatened others and acted as a beacon for sympathy, Wade knew that Miles would be the one to somehow bring about the end of his brief dream of contentment. It has proved a rare instance of Wade’s instincts being not wholly wrong.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Wade Fuerst is at heart a bitter, irredeemable son of a bitch, Miles can’t help but like him some. It may be for no better reason than Miles is, at heart, an irredeemable son of a bitch himself. Under different circumstances, this might have made them brothers of a kind, a pair of feared and unloved outlaws. And it’s true that during his first couple of years in town, Miles could feel that male hunger for friendship radiating from Wade, a furtive longing to stand next to someone and know there is agreement between them on matters that they, men of similar age and experience, considered of real importance. But not now. Not after Miles had done what he’d done. They have never spoken of it, though the crime travels
through their glances all the same. It’s why Wade wishes him dead and, in part, why Miles sometimes wonders if it would be better if he were.
‘Isn’t that
right
, Jackson?’ a voice calls out. Female, American, from one of those midwestern states close enough to the South to get half-mired in drawl. Elsie Bader’s voice. Wife of Jackson Bader, to whom she is now repeating herself. ‘Isn’t that
right?
’
As has become his habit over the last twenty years of marriage, Jackson Bader looks at his wife but does not answer her. When he was still working he loved to talk, to yell, to make those who entered his office at Louisville Steel feel like old friends or the newly unemployed. Even now, three days shy of his seventieth birthday, he can still summon intimidating glares that remind lessers of who they are, of the lengths to which a cloudy-eyed retiree like himself is prepared to go in the name of realizing his whims. His wife may be the only person left he would never level such a look at. He loves her, and supposes that’s why he doesn’t. He still loves her, yes—in a grateful, loyalty rewarding way—and doesn’t want to frighten her. But sometimes he wishes she would only twitter on to herself and not ask him questions, which require a response from him, and because he hadn’t really been listening, he has nothing to say.
The Baders are here to hunt. That is, Jackson Bader is here to shoot one of what he calls ‘those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks,’ and Elsie Bader is
here to take the photos when he brings the animal down. It’s all he talked about at his retirement party. ‘What are you going to do now that you’ve got the time, Jack?’ his successor, a boy with a head stuffed with nothing but bleached teeth and a Stanford MBA, had asked him while lifting a glass of white wine—
white wine
!—to his lips, and Bader had silenced the pup by growling, ‘Thought I’d go up to Canada to bag me one of those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks.’ Three years passed without his mentioning it again. Then, one morning this past November, he had abruptly muted the recroom big screen—an unheard-of interruption of a Vikings vs. Redskins game—turned to his wife and said, ‘You want to go hunting with me in the spring?’ It had been so long since her husband had surveyed her wants that she had said yes and giggled with an overflow of pleasure before she wondered if she actually wanted to witness somebody kill a bear or not.
Miles watches Jackson Bader look about him distractedly, pale and string-necked, and has the impression that the old man isn’t sure what he’s doing here. It’s not the confusion that comes with age or with discovering oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Bader is simply the kind of man who finds the company of strangers slightly absurd, useless, an expenditure of energy on those who, in all likelihood, you will never see again. Miles meets the man’s eyes and wonders if Bader has identified the same distance in him.
Now that he thinks of it, Miles has to concede that everyone here likely sees him as Bader does: the near-silent burn victim, friendless and grotesque. What people wonder about more than anything else are his scars. The muddy splotches that spill down the one side of his neck, his rib cage, and disappear below his waist. All anybody is sure of is they have reason not to ask him about it. Within months of his arrival, Miles earned a reputation as a merciless barfighter on the nights when the drink goes down him the wrong way, or if provoked, or if merely spoken to in what he interprets to be an unfavourable tone. Currently, he is one victim short of sending an even halfdozen down to Whitehorse on free medevac rides.
On these occasions, Miles spends the night under Terry Gray’s watch in the single cell of the RCMP office, apologizing for keeping Terry up late, and Terry telling him that he’s a lousy sleeper at the best of times and that he’d rather type up the assault charges against Miles than lie awake all night in his trailer. Most recently, it concerned a visiting miner who had affronted Ross River’s meagre charms by saying of Bonnie, ‘There’s better-looking barmaids back in the goddamn hole,’ referring to the all-male open pit mine in which he’d spent the last three weeks. For this offence, Miles had beaten the man into a long and dreamless sleep.
Terry Gray has started getting calls. ‘Hear you’ve got a real wild man on your hands up there, Sheriff,’ the superintendent down in Whitehorse will joke
with him, but Terry knows it’s getting less funny all the time. He also knows about the stories. Tales of a monster whose rage has pursued him to the end of the world. He killed a pregnant woman in Prince George. He scarred his face blowing up a Hells Angels clubhouse in Edmonton, and a pack of murderous bikers have been spotted as far north as Carcross, asking after a guy with a fucked-up face. And a dozen other improvised myths. In fact, the Welcome Inn has become as famous in the rest of the territory for the brooding fire ranger who drinks in its bar as for its mouldy, overpriced rooms.
Mungo Capoose sees his boss differently.
‘Miles McEwan? He’s not so mean,’ is how Mungo likes to conclude any conversations concerning his boss’s character. ‘He’s just running away.’
‘From what?’ someone will ask.
‘From his face.’
‘But you
can’t
run from that.’
‘That’s why he’s gone as far as he has.’
There is also a figure visible to Miles alone. Standing in the shadows on the far side of the pool table that’s been too slanted to play an honest game on since Miles piledrived Wade onto it the first and only time he called him Scarface. Miles couldn’t say how long the figure has been there. It’s only when he stares at the one spot for a while that he can make out the outline of a person at all. The slumped shoulders. The pale reflection of unblinking eyes.
It stays where it is long enough that Miles
wonders if it is only his own idle creation. Yet the figure is too inarguably
there
for him to pretend it couldn’t be. Its stillness prevents it from being wholly alive. This is what Miles tries to tell himself. The man in the shadows will remain a shadow until it can move.
And then it moves.
As it slides toward him, Miles counts the ways the shadow takes on colour. Khaki work pants splashed with what looks like machine oil. Eyes showing themselves to be unnaturally wide and red-rimmed. The head so bald it’s missing ears as well as hair.