The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

  ‘It is. And the library, town hall and RCMP detachment, all rolled into one. You’re looking at civilization over there.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like much.’

  ‘We’re the shit end of the stick out here, I guess.’

  ‘Worse than anywhere else?’

  ‘Worse than the towns whose native bands have signed the government land claim offers. Places that get to at least think about building a new school. Or a sewage system that can cut down on the number of times your bathtub fills up with what your neighbour flushed down his toilet five minutes ago.’ Miles looks down at his boots. ‘There’s drugs here, and a lot of drinking,’ he says. ‘And I’m talking about the kids.’

  ‘Isn’t there a counsellor or someone?’

  ‘There’s nobody.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m not paid to be a difference maker. It’s not my job, it’s yours.’

  ‘That sounded a little like contempt.’

  ‘You just heard it wrong.’

  Tom and his friend have slouched their way over to the playground’s edge, where they stand with their hands in their pockets, asking Rachel questions that Miles and Alex cannot hear. The girl says something in return that brings goofy smiles to their faces.

  ‘You still teaching?’ Miles asks her.

  ‘It’s that or waitressing.’

  ‘You used to love it.’

  ‘I’m just tired. It’s a lot to—’ Alex lets her thought turn into a shrug.

  ‘You’re on your own?’

  ‘As far as Rachel goes, yes.’

  ‘That can’t be easy. And the kids you work with are even worse—mentally challenged, or whatever—it must be that much tougher to—’

  ‘You’re right. They’ll kill you. You’re helping and helping all day, and at the end of it, if you’ve done your job, they just need you more. You know?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  From across the parking lot, Mungo Capoose strolls into view, his arm held over his head in a wave, as though Alex and Miles are a half mile distant instead of a hundred feet away.

  ‘Where you off to?’ Miles calls to him.

  ‘Just following orders.’

  ‘What orders?’

  ‘You wanted me to check on King, didn’t you?’

  Mungo grins at them. At Alex, anyway. Miles has forgotten that, in Ross River, Alex will appear not only as an obvious stranger but as uncommonly beautiful. For the first time, Miles acknowledges this as well. Green eyes, freckles, dark hair shining down the back of her neck.

  ‘The fire office is the other way,’ Miles tells him.

  ‘That I know. Just want to share a word with my son here.’

  Mungo keeps his eyes on Alex a moment longer, and when Miles glances to see if she is meeting the older man’s gaze, he finds her smiling back at him.

  ‘He seems nice.’

  ‘Nice? I suppose Mungo’s nice. The sad truth is he’s the best man on my crew.’

  ‘You’ve got friends up here, at least.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  Mungo grabs Tom by the shoulders and gives him a shake. Tom’s friend repeats whatever story he’s already told Rachel and all of them laugh, with Mungo adding something at the end that brings another round of guffaws.

  ‘She’s good at that,’ Alex says.

  ‘Good at what?’

  ‘Figuring out strangers in a hurry.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a skill to have.’

  ‘When you’re on the road with just your mom around to keep an eye on you, it’s a good thing to know who might be bad news.’

  ‘What do you mean, on the road?’

  Alex takes a step forward so that she can look directly up into Miles’s face. Her lips white, bloodless. He’s certain she is about to throw her fist into his face and he spreads his feet apart to keep his balance when it comes.

  ‘Four summers in a row,’ she says instead. ‘Looking for you.’

  Miles turns away. Over Alex’s shoulder, he watches Mungo give Rachel a courtly bow, before taking Tom and his friend by the collars and pulling them off with him, squeezing the boys against his sides as they make a show of trying to escape his grip.

  ‘I can walk you by where I live. I have a dog. His name is Stump,’ Miles offers in a rush.

  ‘Rachel?’ The girl runs up behind Alex, grinning. But when she looks at Miles, her face is instantly emptied of expression. ‘Would you like to meet a dog named Stump?’

  ‘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.

  Chapter 4


  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 31/2 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 Embar
rassing 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.