Wildfire

by Toni Draper

  This is my story.

  On a Saturday afternoon in late June, Fate and Destiny joined forces with a no-less-than-demonically-divine intervention in my life. A ravenous reader in possession of a voracious appetite, I’d wandered downtown to the public library in search of a little food for thought.

  I’d just checked out two armloads of books (some fiction, some not), with characteristic multi-dimensional, multi-faceted personalities in settings that ranged from the great outdoor Arizona desert to the great indoor therapeutic couch.

  And it was closing time.

  Laden low by my very eclectic tri-weekly selection, the weight of many words, I struggled to hold my head up high and squinted against the bright glass door glare. Was it the sun? Or the vision I beheld before my eyes? So slitted and slumped, with biceps that bulged and veins that throbbed and pumped, I saw the light reflecting the New Fiction shelves I’d neglected to scan through before checking out inside. Unable to quell the urge, and undaunted by the less-than-gleeful glances of the library clerks, I two-stepped backward in a Michael Jackson moonwalk shuffle and reentered under the exit sign. Quickly commencing calisthenics, I bent and stretched my strained vertebral column to peruse the surnames sprawled before me across still sturdy and unbroken spines.

  Suddenly, one of the novelist’s names caught my eye.

  Balancing my bundle with a skillfully dexterous maneuver, I slid the book forward and turned it over to read the words “forbidden” and “love” phrased side by side in a blurb on its paperback cover. That look was all it took to persuade me to add the weight of two-hundred and twenty-eight more pages to my leaning tower of prose and boldly take my place back in line.

  What happened next amazes me still, and I’m sure it will for all the remaining days of my life. As if I’d been slipped a swig of love potion no. 9, somewhere in the first paragraphs of the novel, I found myself cast under this captivating writer’s spell, locked in a trance that lured me to a resourceful site online. With my heart beating wildly in my throat (and other bodily parts keeping time), I entered the Amazonian cyber-jungle and, much to my delight, found several same-authored, previously published works, a few reviews, and most intriguingly, a personal invitation by the hexing and vexing mujer herself, bidding her mesmerized readers to write her.

  So I did. And much to my humble and disbelieving, yet paranoid and suspicious surprise, within the hour, a computer-generated guitar (music to my ears) announced the arrival of her even more unexpected reply.

  The date = July 2nd = “a date which will live in infamy” = the day we first reached out and e-touched each other = the beginning of a feverishly impassioned correspondence that would forever alter both me and my life. Not only had I connected with a witty, wonderfully gifted, and talented word lover, but also a more than ten-yeared tenured university professor who would, by nature and virtue of her mere professional existence, introduce me to a “field of glorious study” I didn’t even know existed at the time. A place where the best of both the English and Spanish worlds peacefully coexist and are harmoniously combined.

  But academics aside, we were like two dangling participles and threads at loose ends, longing to be complete sentences in part of a more colorful pattern in the greater woven tapestry of literary life. For this reason, we collaborated upon crossing paths, on written endeavors, arranging and planning our schedules and lives. No easy feat, considering the great expanse of land between us, more affectionately referred to as our mathematically challenging continental divide.

  Meanwhile, we continued our adventurous and lascivious verbal foray and foreplay via e-voicing our admiration of and appreciation for our mutual, yet distinct, ways with words. By posing aloud ponderings such as, “Does the book—and, by extension, the writer—find its reader? Or the reader of the book its writer?” We lavishly poured on the praise for both published (hers) and unrecognized (mine) abilities and insights.

  Looking back over my shoulder with twenty-twenty hindsight, as an eternal and unwavering believer that all things happen for a reason, I remain convinced our roads-less-traveled, which had become dead-end paths, had been out-of-our-worldly-hands meant to intersect. As our bodies, souls, and lives had been destined to celestially intertwine. Beyond that belief, I pragmatically concede realizing that as human beings, we are cruelly prone to misunderstandings and are often pushed or jump off cliffs to plummet headfirst into heartfelt erroneous conclusions in our mere mortal interpretations of the whys. Especially when and where love is in the air, for it is true that the madwoman who free falls does so chutelessly, fumbling around in the dark wearing rose-colored glasses, she is blind. Despite such lucid and apparent rational awareness, from where I sat, as a fervent dreamer at the time, my heart was already on my sleeve, and my head was in the clouds floating high above it. I immediately and unabashedly e-shared with this virtual stranger my thoughts on her literature, my private and personal past, and my peach-faced lovebird’s-eye views on the profound perplexities of real life.

  What can I say?

  It was love at first write.

  Head-over-heels, we moved onto the usual exchanges of photographs (naturally, only those that showed our best sides), then flowers for all-and-no-occasions, with gifts to rival the deliveries of a Kris-Kringling Santa on a certain December night. There were books and jewelry, including a 14K gold chain, “Because I want you to have and wear something that has touched my skin and caressed the space over my heart and between my breasts,” she’d said. I continue to wear it around my neck, although it feels more like a knotted noose now. There was music too. CDs of romantic Latino melodies, some soulful R & B, and Pink’s warning shouts.

  Questions abounded. Mine (now) were, “What happened? Where did those feelings go?” Hers (then) were, “How can this be? How can I feel so much, so deeply for someone I’ve yet to meet? Whose voice I’ve yet to hear? Someone I don’t know?” By email, she expressed to me such gnawing concerns as they did a number on her psyche and caused her self-doubt and a mistrust of others. My impulsive and succinctly impetuous reply, a seven-digit number preceded by a three-digit area code.

  And so it came to be that one day, short of an exact month from our first contact, our relationship set sail on a course for new waters into unchartered seas as we “let our fingers do the walking” and our voices do the talking, night after night after night. Although my ego-defended memory fails to serve me now in the verbatim recollection of our many multi-hour conversations, a self-proclaimed paradoxical enigma, a timidly aggressive femme on the streets and butch in the sheets, who is loudly outspoken yet quietly shy, I will NEVER forget what I, lustfully and with barely concealed libidinous desires, wantonly whispered before putting the receiver to bed that first hot-and-bothered August night, “Think of me when you touch yourself tonight.”

  My wish was her command (and vice versa) as we took the advice of the yellow pages’ slogan, stocks in AT&T, and we simultaneously soared high. Together, we boldly went where we’d not gone before and promptly plotted to burn the only covered bridges that remained between us by purchasing e-tickets for air travel that would warp speed us through the friendly skies.

  We originally agreed to meet in San Antonio. It was, in her well-traveled words, “the most romantic place on the globe.” But as the decided-upon September date quickly approached, I frantically fought to stave off the anxious panic of an attack that had me shaking in my size seven-and-a-half scared-to-death shoes. I got cold feet, and my toes froze in petrified fear of what I might (not) find and feel when I would come face to face with the fantasy my overactive heart and vivid imagination had invented and created between the lines.

  It wasn’t until a springtime West Coast conference that we met in the flesh for the very first time. For her, it was a complete surprise.

  After that, we were repeatedly and heatedly—thanks to planes, trains, and automobiles—going between PHX to BWI American Airlines Unite
d.

  How to describe such indescribable emotions?

  A few awkward and wordless (believe it or not) minutes after the big bird’s arrival, our souls embraced, our bodies merged. Although I so dislike the expression, we swapped saliva. It was but one more magical moment in the fairy-tale, greatest love ever lived, never-ending story of my life, or so I hopelessly and romantically (mis)believed at the time.

  They say all good things must come to an end, and our union was to be no exception to that age-old adage. It would be but a matter of time. And, although no more than four consecutive weeks’ worth of circumstances and commitments would keep us geographically separated between rendezvous’ during the nineteen chapters/months in the book of our life, it became painfully apparent that as individuals and lovers, we were much more different than we would ever be alike.

  In short, she was merlot and linguini with clams. I was a cheeseburger, a Coke, and some fries. She was a dog-loving, stoic admirer of historically educational documentaries. I was a sappy romantic comedy cat person who’d yet to experience the love of a canine with a melancholic penchant for crying my heart out while unashamedly, expressly, and affectionately cuddling on rainy nights. Where it was in my nature to microscopically examine from every angle and perspective, talk to death and overanalyze, she preferred to sweep each and every unspoken speck under the rug, on top of which she demanded we let dozing Dobermans lie. All too aware of our discrepancies, I began to wonder, were we doomed? Or could we be another Gertrude and Alice? Perhaps a Lucy and Ethel? Or would we end up a Jekyll and Hyde?

  Many thoughts, concerns, and worries mazed through my muddled mind, but the farthest, most inconceivable (and contrary to “love conquers all”) impossibility was that ours was to be but a short story with a not-so-happy ending and no epilogue nor sequel in sight.

  Nonetheless, we made it semi-unscathed through those first daunting days to survive the dreaded close encounter with an unexpected and unaware work colleague and the surprise of an ill-timed and misinterpreted vacation call. But when my idea of a relationship as a lifelong, smooth sailing vessel crashed into her anchored, distant, free floating yacht, the waters parted and our relationship (and friendship) began to sink. It was a clear indication we were not on a Love Boat cruise.

  “El amor se va.” “Love goes away.” Those were some of her last words to me as I stared at her incredulously and unblinking, unthinking, my mouth agape and my heart broken wide.

  Although she was not my first same-sex-xx-xx-chromosomal love—and in my defense, I had been rubber-rafted to believe that she had drifted in Sapphic waters to the isle of Lesbos herself before,—in light of recent enlightenments, I no longer have a clue what the truth is or was. What does it matter now, anyway?

  An astrologically defined Scorpio by birth, I confess I possess all the character traits attributed to my sign. I’m passionate, deep, intense, secretive, jealous, and moody, among other things spelled out on a favorite mega mug of mine. A friend once gave it to me “because scarily you are every one of these things,” she said as she hugged, winked, and smiled at me. I drink from it all the time. But where did my shipwrecking marinera read the words in anger she loved to hurl at me, flag-waving, immature, neurotic? Hmm, I’ll have to lift the teabag tag and take a closer look next time.

  In the end, she said I’d seduced her with words. I often wonder about the meaning of her words. The Oxford dictionary on my desk shows the word defined as, “(to) lead astray, tempt into sin, or crime, corrupt; persuade (person) into abandonment of principles, esp. chastity or allegiance; persuade by temptingness or attractiveness.” I remain immortally wounded by such a negation of any love I obviously wrongly believed she ever felt for me. What a low, knockout blow to the depths of a heart’s soul, from an opponent who I choose to believe can only live with herself by fabricating such a hurtful lie.

  Did she mean to imply that our love was a sin? That a wicked wolf cloaked in a sheep’s skin, I’d pulled the itchy wool over her hetero eyes? Had she, pre-me, lived a virginally chaste, vow of celibacy, non-lesbian life?

  These are questions for which I will never have answers, since she has repeatedly and completely hung up on me, shut and written me out of her life.

  Ironically, and of timely interest, I attended a lecture and discussion given by a privy-to-the-passions-and-privacies-of-my-life longtime friend entitled, “Dramatizing the Obvious: The Writer as Voyeur.” Among other fascinations of hers, she brought up a favorite (and coincidental) topic, convinced as she is that “All writing is seduction and all writers seduce when we write.”

  It is true I unclothe my inner self more freely when hidden behind a sheltering computer screen in private, one-on-one communion with another via my writing. Not in an attempt to “have my way” with my reader/prey, but because I lack a certain freedom of speech, a non-wower who is not exactly the head-turning type. In the party animal kingdom, I’m much more a shell-shocked and reclusive hermit crab that seeks refuge from the noisy masses that float and flutter by than a gregariously flitting butterfly. Maybe it is because I believe that to really and deeply know and love another, one must dispense with all physical dis- and subtractions first. In my book, there is no match for the powerfully compelling words of a strong-yet-sensitive, tough-yet-tender, nor any candle that can hold a flame that burns more ardently than the chemically arousing, irresistibly combustible fatal attraction to the bare nakedness of a verbosely intelligent and sensuously sensual female writer.

  As for whether I will ever “get the lead out” and write another sight unseen again, perhaps it is not for this star-crossed lover to decide the alignment of any future heavenly bodies that may appear, out of the blue, in my Milky Way’s galaxy or on my atmospheric horizon. Suffice it to say, it is my unmitigated epistolary belief that “the pen is mightier than the s(poken)word.” Thus, if I am to ever do battle on love’s field again, my fall will, in some way, shape, genre, or form, undoubtedly involve a combination of letters and characters brought to life by the more archaic strokes of quills and pens or by the no longer new millennium’s constant clicking atop square keys housed in the rectangular shape of an ergonomic board. For such is and will be my inherent and undeniable nature until my internal inkwell drieth up and the writer’s lifeblood in me floweth forth no more.

  Chapter 14

  Mena smiled at the memory of the writing. She contemplated dropping a copy into the package she was putting together to send to Sydney, but ultimately decided against it. She wanted the chain she was returning to be received without any such distractions. If she were to decide to send a message with it, it would not be open to interpretation, but would instead be a straightforward communication.

  For the time being, she placed the connected gold links in a padded envelope, put stamps on it, and scheduled its pickup online. She would leave it unsealed until morning, in case she found herself verbally inspired before carrying it to the mailbox. She still hadn’t heard from Sydney, and her unexplained disappearance and continued silence were speaking louder than her temporary return had. It seemed like theirs was not just a lost love, but also a lost cause. She knew if she held onto it, she would be holding onto the past and the love for a woman she needed to let go. Breathing a colossal sigh of relief, she felt her life was finally beginning to regain some semblance of control.

  That mission accomplished, Mena got back to work. With incident reports piled high around her, she went through the stacks, reading each one carefully in search of patterns, whether in time, place, or response. She started a chart for each fire in a one-hundred-mile radius and recorded the time each was reported, weighing that hour against the time the first firefighter arrived on the scene. It was tedious work with little reward, until she noticed one name seemed to appear much more frequently than others.

  Daniel Seth Henderson.

  Interesting, she thought, but it didn’t prove anything, so she moved on.

 
However, once she’d marked the dates and times in Sharpie on a huge wall map of the area, she realized the fires were not that far apart. She doubted that anyone would think anything of it unless they’d been looking for trouble. But armed with this information and nearly a dozen old deer cams she had stored in a shed, a plan laid out in her mind.

  Using Velcro straps, she’d put the camouflaged digital cameras on trees near the edges of as many surrounding forest roads as numbers would allow, keeping in mind they were both motion activated and very sensitive. Even the wind, if it blew hard enough, would set them off, so she had to choose spots for their placement carefully. Since many tourists visited the area for camping and other recreational activities, she wanted to avoid the most traveled roads while covering the ones the firebug, if there were one, would likely drive down.

  She bumped over dirt, spun over gravel, and sailed over asphalt until she’d carefully chosen each spot. Afterward, as she painstakingly reviewed each still capture for weeks on end, one of the things she soon realized was the Coconino wasn’t hurting for wildlife.

  Joe Peña and Mike Davila stood side by side at the base of what had been Elden Tower and surveyed the damage around them. The fire had burned through the area more than a week before, yet from time to time, hot spots were still being uncovered. That’s why they had remained behind, and why they would stay there, until they were convinced it was truly out and over. In his mind, Davila clearly saw the before and after images. He recalled how tall the grass had been on the day they’d found Mena. Every single blade had since been reduced to ash. Amazingly, many of the larger trees, although burned and scarred, still stood. It was a strange but frequent phenomenon in the ponderosa pine forests.

  When he first started studying botany and other courses required for a degree in forestry, Davila found a lot of what he had to learn to be boring, worthy only of a snooze session atop a desk at the university. Later in the course of his education, once he was able to get out and about and do some foot- and fieldwork in the lands of the region, he understood the need for what he, as a freshman, had considered useless information.