The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

  He stops and puts Rachel down. The girl totters on splayed feet but manages to stand on her own. She watches as Miles slips a hand into his firepack and pulls a fusee out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Alex asks him, but the question sounds as though it is addressed to a different context altogether. It means as much to Miles as when he catches an isolated phrase as he spins the tuner knob on the radio.

  He ignites the fusee and walks with it held at his side, tracing a fifteen-foot semicircle with his boots.

  Miles has never really considered why the kid—why Tim—had run on instead of joining him, and he gives the question no more than a passing thought now. Impulse, probably. The plug-yournose—and-jump decision that isn’t really a decision at all.

  He looks down at Rachel and holds his hand out to her. Without explanation or coaxing, without a word between them, the girl takes it.

  Alex attempts another question, but the dry air steals what’s left of her breath. The interruption is long enough for her to forget what she wanted to know. She walks into the circle with the flames burning through her jeans. Arms outstretched, feeling for the girl.

  Left alone, Mungo looks back at the main fire. Its radiance holds him in its path. He might stay where he is to observe its next wondrous innovation, but Miles’s hand is on his shoulder, shaking him.

  Mungo turns. All he can make out are the words Miles shapes with his mouth.

  Come in.

  An invitation. One that the woman and the girl have already accepted. He glimpses them there before a wall of smoke blows in to cut them off.

  Come.

  He walks inside. Blind but certain where he is.

  Miles motions with his hand for the others to lie down close to the smouldering ground but they are already there. Each of them digging at the earth around their faces, scrabbling at the shallow earth.

  The breath Miles took when he first lay down demands release. He coughs it out and takes another, fighting the reflex to gasp. It doesn’t help. The new teaspoon of air shrieks through his chest. Frantic now, he digs until his nails rip from the ends of his fingers. Then his teeth. Chewing for air in the soil.

  He has to tell the others something. A number of things. All of them essential, though he can grasp no more than one at a time. Once announced they are instantly forgotten, so that he loops back on them randomly, like a doll that speaks a handful of phrases when you pull the string in its back.

  Don’t look up.

  Miles lifts his lips from their hole, his head bobbing up and down, as though in prayer.

  Remember to breathe.

  Keep your head down.

  Don’t look—

  In the next instant, their heads are filled with thunder.

  Before the darkness takes them, they feel each remaining strand of hair curl, against their scalps. It almost tickles.

  Chapter 29

  When it stops, it stops all at once.

  The grass an explosive but short-lived fuel so that, within a minute of its passing, the fire is already leaping up to the crest of the slope. It wavers there for a time. The wind bats at it, stretches it thin, holds it still. Soon the flames shrink to campfire size. Dwindling tongues lashing at the sky.

  Miles can’t know how long he’s been watching the fire die on the ridge. Lying with his chin held up on a burnt nest of Labrador tea, moving his eyes left to right and back again along the slope’s abrupt horizon. Past it, the smoke lifts higher, rising fast as balloons released from a child’s grip. Some of it distant enough to have lost the lines that gave it shape, when faces or castles or birds could be seen in the swirling grey.

  Rachel is under him. He hasn’t moved since losing consciousness, so that his back remains arched over her. The shutch still hangs around his neck, the bound Popsicle sticks now resting against the girl’s shoulders.

  He’s been waiting to feel her move. Something more powerful than dread prevents him from rolling over to look. If he can only feel her wriggle against him, he will do, he will say—he will what? All that’s left is what he has done, and what he will do next.

  At first, the earth refuses to let him go. His knees and palms are glued to the black grass. He has to rock his weight from side to side to loosen its grip. After a couple of tries, he’s able to drop on his shoulder.

  He pulls the girl to him, scooping his fingers into her mouth to clear it of dirt. Shakes her but her eyes don’t open.

  Please. A dry crack in his throat.

  The girl lies still. Her limbs loose, ill-fit in their sockets. He arranges her into human shape.

  Please.

  Though the fire has taken the hair from her head, her lashes remain long. Fine curls resting on the tops of her cheeks.

  ‘Rachel?’

  Only when he speaks her name does she awaken. When she can breathe without fighting for each gasp, she blinks up at Miles. Her hands reach for him and he holds her to his chest. The only point of contact is his scar to her lips.

  Next to them, Mungo rises a foot off the ground. Alex’s head squeezes out from under him. She coughs charred bits of twig from her throat. Even as she does, she stretches out her arms. Miles lifts the girl from his chest and lays her on Alex’s.

  Around them, the ground squeaks like melting ice.

  He tries to stand but his legs won’t accept the weight. It forces him to crawl past the two of them to reach Mungo. The clothing on his back is gone. Not just burned but stripped away. His shirt, his pants, even the heels of his boots all vapourized by the fire. Miles drags himself closer and kneels over the body. He can see how the flames had lingered over him. Its strokes have left his skin as delicate as dried tobacco leaves. Miles slips his hands under his ribs and rolls him over. Now he is clothed again. Eyes open but goggled all the way around.

  He passes his hand over Mungo’s chest, trying to smooth the creases in his shirt that have been hardened with the baked salt of his sweat. Something slips away from his touch inside the breast pocket. When he pulls his fingers out they hold a square of blackened steel.

  Miles scratches the carbon off with his fingernail. Gradually, a city emerges. The cluster of familiar towers on a narrow island, the great bridges mooring it in place. With another scratch the words are revealed to confirm it. New York City.

  He rubs Mungo’s Zippo clean against his sleeve. The silver catches what light it can find through the lingering smoke and shines back at him. He flips up the cap. It ignites on the first try.

  Miles snuffs the flame and slips the lighter into his own breast pocket. Then, as best he can, he covers the body with a layer of ash. Shovelling it with his palm, sprinkling it like white pepper over his face. With each handful Mungo disappears beneath a grey hill. It’s not a burial Miles wants to effect, but a shroud.

  When he turns to Rachel and Alex again they are both watching him. For a time they can do nothing but take in each other’s shape to confirm that they are actually here. Risen from the million burned wicks of grass to lounge propped up on their elbows. Taking in the view. Sitting like picnickers on the side of a hill, a circle of good black where a blanket would be.

  Chapter 30

  Already, just weeks after the Comeback Fire had burned itself out, patches of fireweed rise from the fields of ash. The hills outside of town that used to stand in varied shades of green and blue now loom as scorched humps, prickly with violet stubble. In the spring, the first saplings will compete for the light.

  Miles tells Rachel about this, about his favourite things in this place as well as those that appear in his unsettled dreams. Sitting on his lap in the cabin’s backyard. Their eyes alert for ravens.

  And then they find one that had been there all along, perched on the end of a branch too thin to bear its full weight. Its head jerking from left to right before finally fixing on Rachel and Miles sitting directly under it. The bird pulls its wings in tight like a cape.

  ‘Will the boy ever come back?’ Rachel asks, now studying her toes swishing through
the grass.

  ‘What boy?’

  The girl reaches up and covers Miles’s scar with her palm. He leans into her touch so that she need only whisper to be heard.

  ‘The one who lives in the fire.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘But he talked to me. He told me which way to go.’

  Rachel shivers. It is the second weekend in September. The days curling up, the overnight frosts leaving pearly lace over the windows. Miles should go inside and zip the girl into a coat, but instead, he lifts his fleece pullover and tucks her legs inside. Another minute. With winter about to tumble over them any day now, he steals what light he can.

  Miles can feel the map of the girl’s scar pressed against his chest. He is already so familiar with its shape he can read it even when hidden beneath a T-shirt. At the hospital, as soon as he’d seen it emerge from under the bandages, he told her it looked like an island, and she’d demanded to know more. Was there buried treasure there? Toys? Did any bears live in the woods? Miles’s hours by Rachel’s bed were spent racing to make up stories to satisfy her appetite. When she wasn’t pulling fictions out of him, she was asking for the truth.

  He answered her questions about scarring and what it feels like to have others ‘look at you and think you’re gross.’ He told her things about his own recovery he had never told anyone. Admissions of fear, humiliations, the loss of vanity. It exhausted him, but seemed to inject the girl with bubbles of strength. A fair trade, as far as Miles was concerned. He was prepared to give her anything that might shorten the time between the next skin graft and the day they would let her go home.

  ‘The boy helped you get out of the fire?’ Miles asks.

  ‘No, dumb-dumb. He helped me find you.’

  Miles is less shocked than becalmed by the girl’s words, as though some long-held suspicion had now been confirmed. If she could see and hear him when he was a ghost, why not others?

  ‘So,’ she says, tapping his Adam’s apple with her forefinger.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Will he ever come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he might be gone for good.’

  Rachel nods absently, her mind already shifted to new concerns. Then she lifts her hand from Miles’s face and, without looking up herself, points at the branch where the raven had been perched, now swaying from the force of its silent launch. When Miles looks for it, the bird is nowhere to be seen in the sky ahead or behind.

  Alex steps out the back door and follows Miles’s and Rachel’s eyes.

  ‘It’s getting darker,’ she says.

  And it is. Dusk pours over them like chalk powder. When the night comes it will grow as long as the day itself, then longer still, blotting out the light until there is only a dull wash of grey over the noon hour.

  On one of the days at the hospital, the first that Miles noticed the retreat of light from the evening sky, he had tried to ask Alex if she would consider letting him return to the Outside with her and Rachel. She had interrupted him by shaking her head. He assumed she was preventing him from greater embarrassment by stopping his suggestion dead in its tracks. And of course, she’d have been right. Alex and Rachel weren’t bounty hunters. They didn’t come here to bring him back. He was about to thank her for saving him from making a fool of himself when she told him she had her own plans to reveal. She and Rachel both.

  ‘You’ve already talked to her about this?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a joint submission.’

  ‘When? I mean, when did the two of you talk?’

  ‘Even you fall asleep sometimes.’

  They had decided they’d like to try staying on in Ross River for a trial run. The girl had asked to and Alex, cautious of a child’s stated wants, was prepared to entertain an experiment. Like the teachers before her, she would accept only a term contract at the school. All three of them would be here at least until Christmas. After that, they’d see. They’d see.

  ‘You can have the cabin,’ Miles had offered immediately.

  ‘That’s nice. But we’d like you to be in it, too.’

  ‘Me. Oh.’

  ‘We’ll take the spare room, and you can stay in yours. See how it goes.’

  ‘How it goes.’

  ‘Miles? Are you all right?’

  He was shaking so hard the metal tips of his chair legs squeaked like mice over the tiles.

  ‘I’m good. I just don’t remember what this feels like.’

  ‘You’re scared.’

  ‘No. Not scared,’ he said, gripping the armrests as though riding out a spell of turbulence. ‘Just a bit happy, I think.’

  His cabin, like all the remaining buildings in town, had been fattened by a layer of cottony ash, but was otherwise untouched. They were lucky. Nearly half the homes had been torched when the fire roared through. The Welcome Inn’s outbuilding was a pile of black timber, but the lounge was open for business within hours of the authorities allowing people to return. The school, library and RCMP office were gone, along with the Lucky China and the fire crew’s radio shack. Jerry McCormack’s trailer was among those that were razed, and he had moved in with Crookedhead James until he could, he said, work out the insurance, though it was clear he’d never paid for insurance of any kind in his life and that the two men would continue as housemates for some time to come. Everyone without a home moved in with someone who had. Government offers of temporary relocation went unanswered. Even in the devastation, there was a shared sense of not wanting to miss anything. All of Ross River, and not just an unfortunate fraction, would have to start over again.

  The Comeback had continued to burn two full weeks after human survivors and remains had been lifted out of it, and in the end laid waste to some twenty thousand acres of forest. But they were anonymous acres, distant and unpeopled, and therefore of little importance to the outside world. The wildfire season burned on here as elsewhere, but it was noted only for its curiosities, its bite-sized human dramas.

  The handful of reporters who’d made the trip north to cover the story had moved on well before the dead had been buried. Stump had been first. From her hospital bed, Rachel made the funeral arrangements. She asked Miles to fill a jar with ash from where the four of them first entered the fire on the edge of town and bury it in the yard behind the cabin. ‘That’s where we talked,’ she told him.

  Miles took the next day off from his burn unit vigil to drive up to Ross River. In the leaden field beyond the road maintenance sheds, he scooped an empty mustard bottle full of what was once the forest, Toot’s husky team, the rooftops of half a dozen mobile homes, along with Stump’s powdered bones. Alone, he dug a hole down to the permafrost and dropped it in.

  It was only when he walked back into the kitchen that he felt it. The scraps from Alex and Rachel’s interrupted breakfast before the air-vac—milk-sodden bran flakes, curdled coffee, a slice of toast with a moon bitten out of one corner—lay abandoned on the counter. The chess game in the living room that, even from where he stood, he could see was missing the white queen. He couldn’t tell which was the trigger, but some combination of commonplace details brought the dog to him. Not any mere presence, either, no passing chill or creak of the floorboards. It was Stump slapping the back of Miles’s legs with his tail. His trademark request for a second helping. Automatically, Miles bent to lift his dish off the floor. Before he could reach it, the wagging tail was gone. He told no one about it. Still, when he returned to Rachel’s bedside the next morning, he had the impression the girl knew all the same.

  They found some of Wade’s teeth not far from Bader’s Winchester, along with a scattering of other bones, the ones buried deep enough in ash to avoid the worst of the heat. They gathered what they could and flew it down to his family’s place in Alberta. There had been a memorial service of sorts for him in town, right in the Welcome Inn Lounge.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Margot had started her eulogy, delivered from behind the bar, a plywood pulpit. ‘If Wade
’s spirit is in this room with us today—and I believe it is—it would be the first time he’s been in here, night or day, without a goddamn drink in his hand.’

  There had been a dreadful pause. It was Margot’s face that held them in suspense. Deadpan at the best of times, and inscrutable when she was really trying. But on this occasion, even she couldn’t hold it. A smile forced up the edges of her lips and, at the sight of her bared teeth, the place exploded in laughter, a communal shriek that concluded only after the minute it took for Jerry McCormack to blow his nose dry. All of it triggered by the first excuse for release they’d had since the fire, for something to express in public other than empty mumblings of Damn shame or Helluva thing, helluva thing. It took everyone by surprise. Of all people, it was Wade Fuerst they were grateful to for offering this release.

  ‘Didn’t think you’d come,’ Margot said to Miles afterwards.

  ‘I came to say I was sorry.’

  ‘What’s with you and apologies? Wade was like that too. All his life he’s only doing what he couldn’t stop himself from doing, and the whole time he’s saying “I’m sorry”.’

  ‘This is a little different.’

  ‘Because you shot him?’

  ‘If you want to hear it someday, there’s a lot I could—’

  ‘I know what happened.’

  ‘The Mounties sent you their report.’

  ‘They did, but I didn’t read it.’

  ‘Then who have you been talking to?’

  ‘I don’t need to talk to anybody. I know because I shared his bed. Because I was the one stupid enough to think I was doing him a favour by staying with him.’

  Miles turned his shoulder to the rest of the room.

  ‘Most of it is true,’ he told her. ‘But there’s more to what I did than what the police found out.’

  Margot raises his chin with her finger.

  ‘I told you, Miles. I already know.’

  She had left him to get herself a drink, and Miles had slipped out the door, uncertain whether he had just been forgiven or cursed. For most of the weeks that followed he stayed down in Whitehorse with Rachel in hospital. But only the day after their return to Ross River, Margot had come by the cabin to drop off frozen moose steaks. Alex invited her in but she declined, saying she was only there to make sure the three of them didn’t starve until the Raven Nest opened up again. Miles had watched her from inside. Handing over the bag of steaks like some living thing they were being entrusted to care for. She may not have seen him standing there for the shadows, but he believes she had. Margot offering them part of an animal she had killed herself, a gift that showed the necessary violence in staying alive. Miles ate the meat that night and tasted in it Margot’s assurance that he need never speak of what happened with Wade on the slope, not with her.