The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

‘They could be listening already.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The big bears, the ones we’re after—they hunt us as much as we hunt them. I’ve seen some terrible things.’

  ‘Isn’t that something?’

  Margot decides to terrify the woman. In the name of ensuring her silence, Margot tells Mrs Bader true stories about what bears can do when they put a mind to it. She starts with how when they attack, they rip your jaw out with their teeth, so that you lose the ability to bite them back. Sometimes, they drag unfinished kills to another location and bury them alive, to be returned to later. Even bringing one down with the advantage of a clear shot can be a flawed business. A gut-shot grizzly will run off and dig a hole in the ground. When you come to finish it, it jumps out of its hiding place and dedicates the last of its life to chewing through your legs, so that it might enjoy the consolation of watching you bleed to death next to him. Hit them in the hip and they walk on their front legs like a man doing a handstand. Hit them in the heart and they howl.

  ‘Let’s just say it’s not a sound I’d care to hear again.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ the old woman manages. And then, just one last thing out of her for the next hour. Its syllables cracked and tinny, a broken toy of a word. ‘Wonderful,’ she says.

  Margot glances back at the others and notices Wade standing on his own off to the side of the trail. Even Mr Bader has passed in front of him.

  What she also registers is that Wade has his shotgun butt raised to his shoulder. His aim on the back of Elsie’s head.

  A joke. Yet Wade’s crooked smile arrives only after he catches Margot watching him. Even from where she stands, she can see the exposed red tip next to the Mossberg’s trigger. The safety is off.

  By the time Margot makes it back to him, he has lowered the gun and is fishing in his pocket.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Just kidding around.’

  ‘That thing’s loaded.’

  ‘It is?’

  Wade looks down at the gun at his side and shakes his head. Then he opens his fist to show three tablets laid out in his palm.

  ‘If you don’t stop chewing on those you’re going to drop before noon.’

  ‘I need them.’

  ‘And I need you.’

  ‘I’m hurting.’

  ‘Give them to me.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Wade takes a step and draws back his hand. It gives him the room to deliver a roundhouse to the side of her head if he chooses.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says.

  Wade shrugs. Flicks all three pills into his mouth and swallows.

  Whenever she hears someone say that people never change, Margot thinks that, among all truisms, this is the least true. In her experience, people changed, all right. They did nothing but change. Take Wade, for instance. There’s no chance you’d ever confuse the man she had heartdrunkenly fallen for almost a decade ago with this wounded animal whose actions she could no longer predict.

  A big kid off a cattle operation in Alberta, who had come north to bounce between fill-in jobs in the mines and government road crews, who happened to find himself playing blackjack at the casino in Dawson when Margot slid up onto the stool next to his. Until recently, Wade has figured this as a rare visit of good luck. What Margot keeps to herself is this original secret: she had been staring at the broad-backed boy with the wolf eyes, pale blue and wild, for nearly an hour before choosing the seat at his side.

  ‘Looks to me like you’ve got a system,’ Wade had told her after watching her win—and himself lose—four hands in a row. She could feel him wanting to speak to her as soon as she brushed her arm against his when she threw her money on the table for chips. And it was true that he wanted to say something to the beautiful Indian girl—a woman, undeniably, uncomfortably—that one of his hard-headed foremen might say. His search for words coupled with his excitement forced him into tapping for another card after being dealt an eighteen.

  ‘Never had a system,’ she said. ‘I just go when I want to go. Stick when it feels good to stick.’

  ‘It’s working for you.’

  ‘You should try it sometime.’

  ‘Playing by gut?’

  ‘No,’ Margot said, winning another hand. ‘Doing what feels good.’

  She told him that she had a plan to start up a guiding business in one of the last of the ‘out there’ towns, where she would attract the serious hunters and ‘none of this kayak day-trip bullshit’. Wade offered his entire savings—just under two thousand—to become a partner. This was after only three days together, holed up in their room with the sloped floor at the Winchester Hotel, listening to The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival covers tremble through the walls at night, and making love on the screeching bed in the afternoons. Margot remembers thinking that she liked this one more than she could explain. She had distinct thoughts speak themselves to her, clear announcements that had the bracing ring of insight to them. This one’s a gentleman, she’d thought, and Once he gets his hooks in me, he’ll never quit. It makes her angry every time she recognizes how one’s own certainties can be dead wrong one minute and dead right the next.

  Margot tries to forgive herself for her role in bringing on Wade’s dulled eyes, the doubled gravitational pull on his bones, but she can never quite free herself of blame. He was beautiful once. Now, she’s noticed that he’s stopped looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. Instead, he brushes his teeth in the hall. Shaves in the dark.

  And lately, even more troubling habits. Less than a week ago, right after dawn, she’d found him standing in his boxers in the yard, staring at the green hills as though waiting for a signal. And just yesterday afternoon, he’d been cleaning his shotgun in the living room when she passed on her way to the kitchen. As she opened the fridge door, the side glance she’d taken of him became suddenly clear. He didn’t have his eye to the bore, peering down it to make sure it was free of obstruction as one is supposed to do. It was his mouth. Wade’s lips wrapped around the end of the barrel.

  When she’d run back into the living room, the Mossberg sat across Wade’s lap. She was ready to confront him—he knew she’d seen him—but he met her eyes with a placid emptiness. Not the look of someone who means to kill himself. She’d caught Wade stealing a taste of what it is to be someone else. Another man’s horror in the moment before being killed.

  ‘You better get that,’ he said finally. Only then did Margot hear the dropped carton of orange juice glugging over the kitchen floor.

  Margot tells herself that what keeps them together now is the business. It stopped convincing her a long time ago. The hunting trips have been managed by her alone pretty much since they started, and even Wade would admit that she’s twice the tracker and three times the shot that he is. When she cuts away the bogus justifications for staying with a man she has come to fear more than love, Margot recognizes that what really keeps her with Wade is the memory of what he once was. She had been the only person present to observe the brief moment he was whole. Now she is this moment’s guardian, carrying it with her, repeating it in her head as though a lost language and she its last remaining speaker.

  In less than a minute of the broad strides she normally attacks the ground with, Margot resumes her position at the head of the line, climbing to the top of a soft ridge. There’s no point in any more considerations of the past. Not out here, anyway. If there is a bear for them to take she’s got to stay awake for all of them. Starting now. Because although she hasn’t seen or heard anything big since entering the bush at the Lapie Canyon Road, Margot is halfway sure there’s a bear close by. She may have lost confidence in her emotional intuitions, but her hunter’s instincts are rarely wrong.

  She heads another thirty yards up ahead of the others and raises herself on tiptoes, stretching her nose into the air as a bear does. Something new is there. It comes and goes so quickly she can’t identify it, though she knows the regular texture of scents
that makes up the forest at this time of year has been interrupted. It’s not the grizzly they’re looking for, either. It might only be a whiff of her own worry, the slightly bitter taste that foreshadows a headache. It could be something dead.

  Margot lowers herself onto her heels and watches the hunting party make its way up the hill. The smell she caught is gone now, delivered on a fluke of wind. Something in the already fading memory of it makes her think of Miles. She knows it is the nature of smell to colonize whatever people or objects you leave near it. But it’s too late to separate them now. Margot has summoned Miles’s scarred face to her mind, and with it the air now carries the faintest trace of smoke.

  Through the truck’s bug-smeared windshield, Miles looks at his cabin and feels that it is someone else’s. Perhaps it’s that he’s never really taken note of it before, not as he does now, tracing the wonky lines of its walls, the pockets of weeds sprouting out between the roof tiles. This is where he started from, but some invisible renovations have been done in his absence. His inclination to back up and surrender the property altogether is as strong as his desire to walk in and see what changes have been made inside.

  He steps out of the truck and slides a hand over the hood as though calming a skittish horse. What’s strange about the cabin, he realizes now, is that there is somebody inside. He has never seen the lights on from outside, never watched a shadow walk across the living room to the kitchen and return with plates in its hands. The simple observation that others are right now sitting in his home strikes him as an overwhelming intimacy. His scar burns in shyness.

  When he walks in, Alex and Rachel are eating mooseburgers at the living-room table.

  ‘Mungo gave them to us,’ Alex tells him.

  ‘They taste funny,’ Rachel adds, though she follows this observation by taking a huge bite of the black meat.

  Miles stands on the rubber mat by the door and watches them chew.

  ‘I thought you’d be gone,’ he says to Alex.

  ‘We would have been. But you’re back a day early.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘We’re packed and everything.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m early.’

  ‘We could go back to the motel, if you want.’

  ‘No,’ Miles says, shaking his head at them. ‘It’s too late for any of that tonight.’

  Rachel waves half her burger over her head, and Miles pads over to take the seat next to her. The girl slides her plate in front of him. The smell of the meat reminds Miles of his hunger.

  ‘It tastes like the zoo,’ Rachel warns him, her voice lowered. ‘But it’s pretty good.’

  Miles nods at her. Then he lifts the food the girl has given him and eats.

  The sheet parts on the opposite side of the bed from where Miles lies half asleep. He wants so badly to be touched he doesn’t mind if what slides in with him now is a creature of his own invention, a dream he’s managed to bend into the shape of his need. It could be the ghost of the kid making room for himself and Miles wouldn’t object. It is too late for him even to pretend that he could choose what contact he might be offered anymore, or whether it came from the living or the dead.

  But the touch, when it comes, is warm. Smooth fingertips tracing the wings of his shoulder blades, flattening into circles over the whole of his back. Firm enough to build the always surprising heat that comes when skin moves over another’s skin.

  When he rolls over to stroke the back of his knuckles down Alex’s neck, Miles feels the pulse there, a hard tom-tomming that fully awakens him. The clock radio reads 5:14 AM but there is light in the room. The first intimation of dawn creates a stencilling of his pants thrown over a chair, the paper lantern tied around the ceiling bulb, his boots yawning side by side by the door. He can see Alex, too.

  At first, the sight of her naked body is too much for him and his eyes blink away. But when she draws closer she occupies his entire field of vision. As though for the first time, he takes note of Alex’s face, the buckle of bone halfway down her nose, visible only in profile. It is one of the thousand reasons that bound him to her, years ago. He remembers this and sees her crooked nose as too good a thing to ever wish it was otherwise.

  Their kisses are patient. Nothing will be missed. To Alex, Miles’s lips taste the way they always had, something at once sweet and earthy, like black licorice. Without speaking, it is his tongue that tells her that it’s really him with her now. She realizes that she has come to him for this. A confirmation that something essential remained in him that she could identify. A single, recovered detail that ran through the before and after of their lives.

  Alex pulls the sheet back from Miles’s chest and drops it on the floor. She takes the time to follow the map of his burn, long enough to let him know that she is unafraid. Miles allows her to study him. He spreads his arms out from his sides, turns his head to show the markings down his neck. When she balances herself on top of him, he wishes only that she stay there.

  The idea of asking Alex why she is here passes through his mind. The thing is that, even now, he wants to know. The comfort she gives him is so far beyond anything he deserves, he can’t help but suspect she is leaving him with this so that he might know what he can never have again.

  Tomorrow, he thinks. She said they’ll be gone by tomorrow.

  Through the veil of her hair he can see the morning shadows retreating under the eaves. Tomorrow is already today.

  If it’s a punishment she has in mind, he’ll accept it. He will welcome her and the future on any terms it proposes. Miles steadies Alex’s face in his hands, watches the green return to her irises in the growing light. There he finds the story of all that she’s lost, the damage he’s done, the versions of happiness she’s imagined. And a mile farther down, he recognizes himself.

  When Miles awakens, he’s alone again. Alex had tucked him in when she got up, notching the cover under his chin as he imagines she does for Rachel on restless nights. The clock radio is blinking 7:15 AM—his usual alarm setting. He doesn’t remember it going off but, judging by the way it’s lying upside down next to his socks on the floor, he must have heard its hateful beepings and brought his fist down on the Snooze bar. It’s the sort of thing he’s done before. Usually, though, it’s on account of several beers too many the night before, and not the continuation of a rare good dream. Already its details are rushing away. All he knows is that it had to do with flying. In it, Miles was a blackfeathered bird, gliding over a spangled river. Although he couldn’t see who flew next to him, he wasn’t afraid because he wasn’t alone.

  Alex pushes the bedroom door open. She’s wearing a bathrobe of his that he hasn’t worn in years. It’s so big on her and its plaid squares so bright and patchy she looks to have been halfway to putting on a clown suit before deciding to make coffee instead. She shuffles over the hardwood in bare feet and puts a mug down on the bedside table where the clock radio has left a dust-free rectangle.

  Miles can’t help staring up at her. She’d be warm inside all that bundled terrycloth. Her mouth would taste like sex and bitter grounds. He’d like to reach out and pull on the single knot in the belt around her waist. If he did, the robe would fall open like a curtain. Pink nipples and cocoa freckles in the morning’s new light.

  ‘Is Rachel up?’

  Miles realizes that he’s heard this question coming out of his mouth before he thought to ask it.

  ‘Are you kidding? It’s nearly eight. She’s been running around with Stump the last three-quarters of an hour.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you get up.’

  ‘I wanted to be out of here before Rachel came knocking.’

  He can hear Stump barking outside, a whoof of mock protest he hasn’t heard from the dog in ages. The girl is giving him orders and he’s doing his best to follow them. Miles tells himself to take the dog out more, maybe let him play with those kids around the trampoline. It’s not fair to deny him the pleasure he can hear in those barks. Then again, maybe it’s only Rac
hel he likes. People aren’t interchangeable for other people. Why wouldn’t it be the same for mutts?

  ‘We’ve only slept together a few times,’ Miles says, once again surprising himself through his grogginess.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me and Margot. And it was a mistake.’

  ‘I would have thought that was nobody’s business.’

  ‘It wasn’t. But now it might be your business, too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of last night. I owe it to you to be honest, at least.’

  ‘You don’t know a fucking thing about what you owe me.’

  Miles sits up on his elbows in retreat, the back of his head pressed to the wall.

  ‘I’m just trying to talk to you,’ he says.

  ‘And there’s nothing to say. You ran away, I found you. You’ve seen her. Visiting hours are over. Time to get back to our real lives.’

  ‘I’m not sure what my real life is anymore.’

  ‘It’s this,’ she says, shifting her eyes from side to side to take in the bedroom, the shape of his body in the bed. ‘Looks lonely, doesn’t it? And it will be. But then, it’s your home now. Lonely is where you belong.’

  All at once, Alex puts her mug down next to Miles’s, pulls the belt away from her waist and drops the bathrobe into a fluffy circle around her feet. She can’t stop herself from sneering. One last flash of satisfied vengeance.

  She scans the floor for the clothes she shed the night before. Piece by piece she dresses herself, a reverse striptease that pains him to watch. Her nakedness taken from him in the slipping on of socks, the wriggling lift of underwear.

  ‘There’s still a couple things I need to have done on the truck,’ Alex is telling him. ‘So we’ll be out of here first thing tomorrow instead of today.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘We can stay at the motel.’

  ‘I’d rather you have the cash than Earl.’

  Alex is leaving him. It’s what he wants, what he knows has to happen. To leave him like this, shrivelled and powerless, is why she’d looked for him in the first place. None of this stops his chest from filling with slushy weight, a pre-emptive mourning. He can see Alex zipping up her jeans, her bellybutton winking at him. He can hear Rachel’s laughter through the glass. But Miles already feels both of their absences looming before him as though they are already gone.