Nick spat out a mouthful of bark chips and roared out a laugh. He slammed Gus in the ribs with his knee, and she let go for a second, long enough for Nick to kip up and get into something more like a fighting stance. Then Gus was on him again, taking him right back down into the dirt.
“Our ride,” Nick panted, grabbing Gus by the hair. “Quit it. I hear the ATV.”
It was too late to pretend they hadn’t been doing anything: the clear-cut offered long sight lines. Their foreman looked thunderous as he brought the ATV up to the cache. “We have a policy for this shit,” he said, glaring at Nick.
Nick glared right back. “Fuck policy,” he said.
“Sorry. We were just sparring,” Gus said, her expression mildly apologetic but her hand pinching hard at Nick’s backside. “We go to the same boxing gym at home.”
“I don’t care what kind of jujitsu you know. You don’t speak to me that way,” the foreman said to Nick, pointing. “Policies are there for a reason, and it’s my job to keep you guys safe.”
“Sorry,” Nick bit out as Gus kept up the pressure. “Potty mouth, that’s me.”
“Oh?” the foreman said. “Well, try keeping a lid on it, or you’ll be shipping out on the next town day. I don’t want to pay workers’ comp for some kind of bullshit sporting injury, and I don’t want to deal with any attitude, either.”
He dismounted from the ATV then to stow their shovels on the side rack, and while his back was turned, Gus wrapped her fingers around Nick’s wrist and squeezed until Nick gasped. She didn’t need to say anything. By the time the foreman looked back at them, Nick had his daypack on and his face as neutral as it was going to get.
Nick and Gus sat up on the back of the ATV, shoulder to shoulder, while the foreman stood up and steered over logs and slash and rutted mud. Gus looked over at Nick and mouthed, “Better?”
Nick nodded—of course he was going to say yes to that; he wasn’t stupid—but he still felt angry energy prickling over him, joining the chafe of dried sweat and the itch of mosquito bites. He looked back over his shoulder at today’s work site.
They had not been able to fill in all the available trenches today, so they’d be coming back tomorrow, to the same depressing clear-cut bounded by depressing stands of scrubby, dense forest. Nick hadn’t bothered to find out what kind of trees they even were, but there were another twenty-odd boxes of them waiting under a silver tarp for him and Gus to put in the ground.
He did feel a little better, he guessed, like he might be able to get to sleep after dinner. It was the later part of the nights that got bad, more often. He complained about the other workers, but it was even worse when they were all sleeping, when the wind dropped and the silence was the deepest and widest Nick had ever heard, hundreds of miles from the next closest human settlement, and the dark so heavy he couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or shut.
In those moments, he almost wanted to crawl out of his tent—fuck, out of his skin. Out of this wilderness and on to someplace different, someplace he’d never been.
JULY 14
WAXING CRESCENT
Smoke rode the prevailing wind to their camp, staining the sun dull red. By noon, all the tents were struck, the shitters were filled in, and the radio pole lay lengthwise along the tree line. The cooks were disassembling the stoves on the patch of bare earth that had been the cook shack. Nick sat on his backpack, rolling a joint.
“Put that fucking thing away,” Gus said without lifting her arm from over her eyes. She lay on the ground with her feet propped on her kit bag. “How d’you think these fires get started in the first place?”
“Everyone knows bears smoke in bed,” Nick said, and he ran his tongue down the seam of the fragile paper. He tore a rectangle from the cover of the packet of Zig-Zags and rolled it into a cylinder to serve as a filter. Overhead, another water bomber roared by, slow and full, on its way to drop its quenching payload on the fire. Flights had been passing all day: they looked like they held as much water as a swimming pool, Nick thought, but what was a swimming pool against the might of a fire that spanned a hundred hectares?
“—out of Pikangikum,” Gus was saying as the noise of the plane retreated. “I’d like to see that.”
“Maybe we will.”
“Nah,” said one of the other crew members nearby. “They’ll put us in a no-tell motel on the highway somewhere, and we’ll spend all our fucking money at the peeler bar while we wait around.”
“Or they’ll draft us and give us piss packs,” said Gus.
“I vote for the motel,” said the other guy.
“I dunno. Fighting fires sounds like fun,” Nick said.
“Yeah, but you’re hard-core,” the other guy said with an eye roll. “Some of us actually like to relax.”
“Hey, I like to relax,” Nick said, holding up his joint.
“Whatever, dude.”
“What do you mean, ‘whatever’?” Nick demanded.
Gus reached over with the arm that wasn’t covering her eyes and felt around until she got hold of his knee. “You are not fucking relaxed is what he meant,” she said. “Sit tight. Once we get to the motel, you can smoke that thing and chill out.”
Nick held the joint to his nose and inhaled the resinous scent of it. Fucking fire ban. Who cared if the forest burned? People like him would just plant more of it.
He had that slip-sliding feeling that he wouldn’t have felt that way before, but he had that feeling about a whole lot of things now, and why the hell was Gus in his face all the time, anyway?
She was right up against him, blinking her bloodshot eyes a few inches from his own.
“Calm. Down.” She breathed it against his ear and then backed off. “Nick, I feel like a peach. Do you feel like a peach?” She pulled her bowie knife from her boot and a peach from her daypack and started slicing, efficient sweeps of the blade through the thin skin.
Nick watched. She was right. He knew she was right. He just couldn’t always keep the knowledge right up front where he needed it. He hypnotized himself on the motion of her hand. When she held out a slice on the blade of her knife, he took it in a grasp a bit too tight, and juice welled over his fingers where they bruised the flesh.
After another hour of waiting, the word came from the foremen: evacuation. Motel in town. They boarded the crew buses and rolled out, and Nick sat by a window with Gus between him and everyone else, and he turned his joint over and over in his fingers, waiting for the moment when he could set it alight.
It didn’t come for hours. Hours of jouncing over pitted gravel roads, hours of vibrating out of his skin; but finally they were spilling off the bus, and Gus was inside getting them a room, and Nick could pace the perimeter of the parking lot until she told him where to go.
The motel room smelled of bleach and mildew. Nick stripped his filthy clothes, dumped them on the bathroom floor, and stood in the shower with his joint between his lips and a beer on the ledge of the tiny window.
“I’m going on a liquor run,” Gus said from the other side of the shower curtain. “I’ll pick you up some of that bourbon you like.”
“Hurry it up,” Nick said on an exhale of pot smoke. Fucking finally.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Gus said.
“Depends—do you think jerking off is stupid?” Nick said back, and he heard her snort of laughter before the bathroom door clicked shut.
He did that. He wasn’t lying. He rubbed one out and then did it again, which was one of the more awesome things he’d discovered about his new nature. Got clean: scrubbed off the ground-in dirt of a long contract, four weeks marooned in the bush with only the rest of the crew for company. Ash caked over sweat and bug dope, salt crusted in his hair: all of it swirled down the drain, leaving a grubby ring in the tub. He finished his beer and padded dripping over the stained motel carpet to fetch another.
The shower went cold. Gus didn’t come back.
Nick drank the third and final beer while pacing naked from
one window to the other. It didn’t take him very long. Gus had said to wait, but he got dressed instead in the cleanest things he still had—cargo pants and a wrinkled T-shirt from the bottom of his pack—and strode out to the motel balcony.
The air reeked of smoke, just as much as it had in their camp. He couldn’t really see it, except in the red haze over the sun, but somehow, since his new nature had taken hold, scent had become important enough to him that it overrode his other senses. He could look at the late carmine sunset and see that it was pretty, but he could not ignore the smell of imminent harm. It fretted at the edges of his temper like blackfly bites.
He knocked on a few doors, looking for his crew. Someone shouted, “Fuck off!” Someone else was having sex. One door opened, and a girl he didn’t like gave him a dizzy grin and asked if he wanted some mushroom tea.
He shook his head. “Seen Gus?”
“Your better half? Or are you the better half? Isn’t she at the bar?” the girl said with that twist to her mouth that people always seemed to have when they were talking about Gus.
“Don’t you fucking judge her,” Nick said, fist clenching empty at his side as if he wasn’t always judging Gus.
The girl laughed, not noticing his anger. Nick left her standing in the doorway and pounded down the iron stairs and across the parking lot to where a yellow-and-red plastic marquee advertised the One Spot, Liquor and Beer.
As he neared the door, he caught the scents of stale drink, trucker sweat, chips, and cigarettes, stronger and fouler for the weeks just spent in the bush, ash and all. He glanced back over his shoulder at the motel, and beyond it, the deep blue sky and the dark fringe of trees. That forest went on for more miles than Nick could imagine, broken only by logging roads, reservations, and bush camps, the ribbon of the Trans-Canada Highway and its string of lonely towns.
And the fire. The forest was broken by the fire. How many square miles now?
His feet, blistered and callused by weeks of work, still felt like running. He hesitated, on the brink of letting them.
Instead, he made them march up to the tavern door, and he made his hand reach out and open it, and inside the rank dimness he saw Gus, at the bar, palming matted hair out of her face and wrapping dirty fingers around a glass.
“I told you to wait,” Gus said, her gaze flicking from Nick’s wet hair to his clean shirt to his feet, which he’d left bare.
“I didn’t feel like waiting,” Nick said, hoping it didn’t come out as hostile as he felt.
“Pull up a stool, then,” Gus said. “I’ve got your bourbon in my pack, but they didn’t have any of the stuff I like, so I stopped in for a refresher.”
Knowing Gus, she probably meant two or three. Not that Nick could really blame her right now. She looked sad and old and kind of pissed off, and if she felt half of what Nick did lately, she was a damn saint for giving him the first shower and picking up bourbon, and he shouldn’t complain about her taking a bit longer than he’d expected.
He still wanted to punch her in the face.
He slid up next to her, brandishing a fifty, all crumpled and warm from the pocket of his cargo pants, and even as his mouth watered for drink, he wondered once again how long he’d be able to keep on not leaving.
JULY 15
WAXING CRESCENT
Gus woke up with a sudden urgent kick, jerking her flannel shirt from around her head. It reeked of her own work sweat.
Her mouth tasted like bourbon. She smacked her lips together and threw off the motel coverlet. She could smell the water inside the pipes, chlorinated and stale. She turned it on cold and put her mouth to the tap.
Water roiled down into her belly and chilled her from the inside.
The whole room was colder than it should be. She could still smell Nick—a funk similar to her own—sweat, swamp muck, booze and pot, waxy soap that didn’t quite scour down all the layers of dirt.
But the scent wasn’t fresh.
She was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. This wasn’t the bush, where he had a choice of trackless woods or a single logging road. The Trans-Canada Highway was right outside their motel. It had Greyhounds and trucks, family sedans, and the Broncos and 4Runners favored by blueberry pickers. Nick could have charmed his way into any of them; hell, he could have bullied his way into any of them too. He could be well on his way to the American border already.
Gus was still wearing her sport top and road-filthy jeans. The motel key and roll of bills were still in her pockets. She kicked through the tangle of clothes on the floor until she found her boots. Half of the stuff there was Nick’s dirty laundry, but his day pack was gone.
And his tent. That meant at least a chance he’d picked the woods.
She stepped quietly down the iron stairs from the motel balcony. Whiskey still slopped around in her head. It made her feel loose and warm despite the night chill on her bare arms. But she’d only had a few shots’ head start before Nick came into the bar, and she hadn’t been alive this long without learning to handle her drink.
If he’d meant to put her under the table, he hadn’t done a very effective job of it. No, she thought, he’d just been seized with the desire that overtook them all sometimes, and a few drinks behind, he hadn’t been able to sleep it off.
She shoved her hands in her pockets and strolled around the perimeter of the motel parking lot, breathing deeply. No need for haste, was there? She didn’t want to risk missing the scent.
On the second round, she caught it, elusive but unmistakable.
The woods.
Under the trees, pupils jacked open uselessly, she saw texture in the blackness where there was none and nothing at all where there were branches to scratch at her hair and face. She slowed down and shut her eyes and groped forward along the thread of scent. Behind her, the sound of the highway faded and faded and was gone.
The scent was obscured now and then in the heavy overlay of ash, but she was going upwind, and she was very good at this, and she always found it again. And after a long, slow time of it, the sun began to rise, red and evil, and she saw she was going east.
It took her hours, but finally she ran Nick to ground at the edge of the burn. Less cover here: black, ragged spikes of tree trunks with all their branches and bark fired off, and the ground smoothed with drifts of ash.
She could see Nick now, plodding forward, misshapen by the pack on his back, his legs gray to the knee.
The fire itself was close enough that she could see towers of fresh smoke above the trees, northeast. She could hear it too, a dull crackling rush; or maybe that was only the hangover piling up at the base of her skull.
No ground crews, though; maybe the burn they had reached was a firebreak, and the crews fought on another front.
She did not want to shout, her throat and chest tight and aching. She quickened her pace and closed the gap between them, ash puffing around her boots.
He turned when he heard her coming. She saw the resignation on his face.
“Should’ve known I couldn’t get out from under Big Sister’s eye,” he said, his voice raw with smoke and fatigue. “Come to take me back? Did you bring any water?”
“Nope,” Gus said. She slowed, bent to set her hands to her knees, and coughed.
“Jeez,” Nick said. “Next time I run away, I’ll make sure to take along a care package for whichever warden comes to put me back.”
Gus fell in beside him and nudged his shoulder to direct him a bit farther north.
“Where are we going?” Nick said through a yawn. “Not straight back?”
“To the fire,” Gus said.
“Knew you wanted to see a water bomber in action,” Nick said, smiling, teeth white in ash-smudged, dark-tanned skin.
“Let’s not talk,” Gus said.
Her eyes stung. Her mouth tasted like bourbon and smoke.
Closer to the fire line, step by aching step. And then she heard it coming, a ripping bellow of engine noise. She held Nick still with a hand on
his wrist. They looked up.
There came the water bomber, belly full, streaking directly over them toward the thickest smoke. Gus’s eyes teared up. The plane vanished over the trees before she could see it drop the payload.
She looked down just in time to catch Nick’s fist swinging around into her ribs. She tucked her arm in and tightened her core, took the blow harmlessly on her bicep, pivoted for a punishing counterpunch.
“Gotcha!” Nick crowed.
Gus pulled the counterpunch, instead smacking him lightly in his solar plexus. Nick coughed out a laugh and dropped his pack. “Never too tired to spar, huh? I’ll let you try my Wu-Tang style!”
He made some kind of bullshit hand-chopping motions. Against her will, Gus felt herself grinning. She did some theatrical shadowboxing and charged in.
Damn, it felt good to fight, even so tired. Fists, flesh, the thump of bone. Weight against weight. Breaking apart and closing again, each laughing when the other scored.
Maybe she could keep this. She caught Nick in a headlock. He nearly threw her over. She kicked his feet out and got her grip again.
“Surrender!” she said. “It’s a long way back to town, and I want breakfast.”
Nick snorted air through his nose. “Guess it would be a waste of time to offer you whatever’s left of my cash advance to just let me skip out.”
He made it sound like surrender, but it wasn’t. Nick was always joking and never joking.
Gus felt the fun evaporate right out of her and blow away with the smoke.
She braced her feet, felt Nick react to the minute shift of weight with a shift of his own.
She wanted to say something, but she was too tired to start it all up again.
She set her free hand to the side of Nick’s face, let the gesture be comforting for a fraction of a second, and then gripped tight.
From there, it was the work of a moment to snap his neck.
Spells of Blood and Kin Page 27
