After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  “You’re asking me?” Barnes could see everything that Ruth was telling him but he let her narrate the scene, let her offer a play-by-play analysis.

  “She’s reading to him. Daddy reached over. He closed whatever, a folder, that she was reading from. She laughed. Who is she?”

  Barnes did not answer. He knew that Ruth was now asking her father this question and not him.

  “She laughed again. She’s beautiful. You think Daddy and her . . .” The question trailed off into air.

  They watched Call and the woman for nearly a half-hour as the city began to come alive around them. Other stores opened and the owners pushed wide brooms across the sidewalk to clean off the cigarette butts and sand that had accumulated overnight. A few early shoppers pushed aside the morning on their way to various stores. A couple of businessmen or lawyers, carrying their breakfasts in one hand and briefcases in the other, passed in front of the coffee shop. Barnes recognized one of them as Ginrich, the refined bit of bad news who represented Max Downey’s father.

  When Call left with the woman, Barnes and Ruth sat in the front seats of the Volvo staring through the windshield at the coffee shop. A soft silence lay across them, which Barnes interrupted. “What do we know?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said. She turned to face Barnes. “I never thought I’d see Daddy with another woman. It’s good, I guess.”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  Barnes started the car and drove back home. He would go fishing that day, spend the morning casting and walking and having something not very important to not worry about. He felt as though he had been sliding back and forth between different categories of life, as though every day was a sudden spin-the-bottle of experience. The notion of a world composed within the slow arc of a fishing line settled him.

  He and Ruth said little after they parked her car. She went inside her house, and Barnes retrieved his rod and reel from the dust of his basement. He drove up the Poudre, stopping above a wide spot in the river less than a mile from the mouth. No cars passed him as he gathered his case of flies and the rod and reel from the gun rack. He leaned back against the truck with the sun in his face as he strung the rod and tied his fly. He left the road and walked down the slope to the river.

  A fire had burned the slope not too long before. Maybe a month, Barnes thought, based on the blackened grasses, not much after the end of the snow. He considered the possibilities—probably a windy day, for the heavier fuels would not yet have dried and the grasses dead from the previous year would have carried the flames; a tourist driving the canyon tossed a cigarette butt out his window; the still-hot end of the cigarette landed in a bunch of high grass; the wind heated it and drove the embers into flame and across and up the grassy slope; it would not have had the strength or length to jump the road for a run up the hillside and was probably dead before any fire trucks arrived.

  He slipped and caught himself by his free hand. The raised, quarter-sized scar left from a burning ember showed purple as he pushed himself away from the ground, the blood from slight exertion pushing through his hand. He left a solid handprint in the ash. The palm of his hand had blackened and before wiping it clean on his pantleg, he smelled the lost aroma of this small fire.

  The smell triggered his memory as the sound of a generator could trip thoughts of awakening to the morning fire camp, or a helicopter’s thump could pull back expectant waits on a helispot, or chainsaws cutting into a tree’s wood, or a shovel’s handle in his palm. Rapid-fire thoughts of how he had come to be formed.

  He looked across the stretch of burned hillside and saw the green tops of shoots of grass pushing through. The green of the new grass struck him as almost too alive. Then he looked into the river swirling against the rocks and then slowing into gentle ripples.

  The sun was still in his face and cast shadows back on the scarred slope he descended. He looked down the river’s course, followed it until it rounded a corner and disappeared within the glints of light. The river’s water was clear and cold around his jeans and Chuck Taylor’s, shocking him when he walked into it. He spent the rest of the morning fishing along that strip of the river, releasing the only two fish he caught. That afternoon, with the sky high and open and the sun warm on his back, Barnes returned to the hillside and retraced his steps back up through the blackened scar.

  The late-afternoon sun shined full on his back as Barnes leaned under the hood of his truck to screw the idle another quarter turn out. He then started the truck again and listened, smiled, and patted himself on the knee. After turning off the old truck’s engine, he again walked to the truck’s front and reached to close the hood, whistling. “Just like a kitten.”

  Ruth asked, “What?”

  In the harsh light bouncing from the hood and windshield, Barnes did not at first catch sight of Ruth. He closed the hood but not hard enough for the latch to catch. Without fixing the hood, he shaded his eyes to see her standing on the curb. She wore the same white T-shirt with a cowboy print on it and Levi’s she had on that morning, and Barnes could see small drops of perspiration on her forehead and in the hollow below her neck. He answered, “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

  “Talking to yourself?”

  “Nobody else to talk with.”

  “And I thought only old men and married people talked to themselves.” Ruth, carrying a hemp bag of groceries in one arm and a six-pack of Newcastle in the other, leaned against the rounded quarter panel of the truck. She placed the bag on the curb and the six-pack on the truck’s hood. Tracing a finger across the truck’s surface, she said, “A little rusty.”

  “Just surface. A little body work and some new paint and she’ll look ready for the prom.”

  “It ain’t the only one needs body work and a new coat of paint.”

  “You feeling a little sorry for yourself?”

  “And don’t you think I have a right?” She pulled a bottle from the six-pack and offered it to Barnes. He took it and knocked off the cap on the truck’s bumper.

  “I think you’re better off now than at any time since I’ve known you,” he answered. He tilted the bottle toward Ruth in a toast, “To the wings of liberty.”

  “May they never lose a feather,” she answered while opening a Newcastle for herself, meeting Barnes’s toast and drinking.

  He drank, then rolled the bottle across his forehead to allow the condensation drops to cool him. He watched her bend her head back to catch the sun’s warmth. Her eyes were closed, and he could see her pulse in her throat. Dimpled with perspiration, the slight beat caused her throat to shimmer in the sun.

  Ruth opened her eyes. Barnes watched her eyes follow the three-legged squirrel, Tri-pod, across the road. Her glance darted from Tri-pod to an advancing minivan. She began to touch her mouth with a finger as the squirrel stopped in the middle of the minivan’s lane. Barnes turned to watch also and leaned instinctively to push Tri-pod along. The squirrel, as though jacklighted on the pavement, stood staring down the car until he jumped and scurried across to the telephone pole.

  “I thought he’d become a pancake there,” Ruth said.

  “He’s gutsy. I’ll give him that.”

  Ruth brushed back her hair and bent to pick up her bag of groceries.

  “I thought you worked at the library today,” Barnes said quickly, not wanting her to leave. He wanted to hold her presence with him for a while longer. For the moment, she formed a thin veil of solace, and he breathed in the words from her as though they were infused.

  “I just couldn’t convince myself to go in.”

  “Call in sick?”

  “I’ve used up all my sick days. I called in dead. Told them that when I was resurrected I’d be back.”

  “And how long will this take?”

  “About the time some poet on a Harley stops at this intersection.”

  “You may have a wait ahead of you.”

  “Until then, I guess, I’ll sit in my attic room by the window, knitting shawls
and living my life at a slant.”

  “Or you could put on red pumps and a go-to-hell dress and go dancing.”

  “There’s a thought for this poor girl.” She lifted her bottle to touch against the neck of Barnes’s Newcastle.

  Call’s El Camino rounded the corner to park against the curb. Grace, in a great gasp of joy, opened her door and ran to Ruth, who bent to greet her. For a moment the world collapsed within their hugs and smiles. Barnes leaned against his truck to listen for a few moments to their pleasure.

  Through the windshield of his truck, he could see Call grimace getting out of his vehicle. Arthritis had stretched its tendrils through his joints at an early age. Even though the man’s joints often worked against him, once his feet touched the ground and he began to walk, he steadied. The eventual tranquility of his gait made it easy to forget the man suffered in his joints as well as from the remnant pain left by his shrapnel wounds. Below the shadow cast from his Stetson, Call’s reddish face gleamed like high clay. He smiled at Ruth and Grace in their embrace and nodded in communion to Barnes. While Call’s body suffered from his war and his movements often looked to be those of a man older than his seventy years, his smile kept the warmth of youth.

  Call patted the side of the truck with his open hand. Even with the sun behind him and his hat shading his eyes, he squinted when he looked from Barnes to Ruth and Grace. He took his unlit pipe from the corner of his mouth and smiled again.

  “Good day, Call,” Barnes said.

  Call pushed back his Stetson. His voice dulcet and soft, he answered, “But today is a fine day. A good day for baseball, huh, Barnes?”

  “A good day to play two.”

  “Hah, yes.”

  “Didn’t you, Grandpa?” Grace asked. She had turned her head inside of Ruth’s hugging arms to look at Call.

  “Didn’t I what, sweetheart?”

  “Didn’t you promise me I could have a popsicle soon as we got home?”

  Call shook his head and looked down at his cowboy boots. He looked back up at Ruth out of the corner of his eye like a kid caught and said slowly, “I guess I did.”

  “Daddy,” Ruth said, her eyes sharp and straight into Call.

  “He said so,” Grace said. “Grandpa’s not a liar.”

  “This one time, okay. But any more, little girl . . . and old man . . . popsicles wait until after dinner.” Ruth let Grace down. The girl turned to run for the house and her treat.

  After a step, though, she turned back to face Ruth and said, her voice filled with expectation and sudden sadness, “Is Daddy home?”

  “No, baby,” Ruth said, bending down and beginning to reach for Grace. “No. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Is he gone forever? Is he dead?”

  “No, he’s not dead. He’s just gone for a while. He’ll be back.”

  Grace walked to her house without saying anything else. Barnes could see the questions circling her, questions the little girl was unable to ask much yet try to answer. In the center of those circling questions, bare and harsh in the sun’s light, was the same ‘Why’ that Barnes knew well.

  Ruth stood. Her shoulders hunched, her hands trembling. She rubbed the tips of her fingers across her cheeks, then held them to her lips. She watched as Grace rounded the front corner of their house. With a heavy breath, she sighed, “Goddamnit. How do you deal with that?”

  She had not asked Barnes or Call and neither man offered her an answer. Barnes could not even think of an answer to offer her.

  Without saying anything more and without looking at the two men, she picked up her bag of groceries from the curb and her beer from the truck and walked after Grace. Barnes watched her leave only for an instant before he opened and shut the truck’s hood again, this time hard enough for the latch to catch tight. He felt a heaviness in his eyes.

  “I hope he doesn’t,” Call said low.

  Barnes looked at him and his look carried the question.

  “I hope he doesn’t even come back,” Call repeated. Call looked straight at Barnes, then at his house and continued, “It would be hard on that little girl, and her mother also, but him leaving would be the best thing that could happen. Robert isn’t much of a man . . . not enough of a man, anyhow, to keep himself right. He’s got the best things a man can have right here and he’s probably off thinking he’s got a life. They’d both have a hard time getting over it but if he left, Grace would be better off. If he comes back, you’ll have to keep me from shooting the bastard.”

  Barnes knew Call meant it. People who disturbed Call’s world did not fare well. Barnes turned his face, though, at the quick image of Call, naked other than a pith helmet and his Red Ryder BB gun, taking a bead on Robert in the driveway.

  “You know, Call, I’m glad you and I are friends,” Barnes said.

  “You should be,” Call said.

  “But I’ve got something to tell you that’s going to piss you off big time.”

  Call said nothing. He wiped his brow and leaned against the truck’s quarter panel waiting for Barnes to continue.

  “Ruth and I followed you this morning and watched you meet that woman.”

  Call took some time before he replied. He dropped his head as though scanning the road’s blacktop. He kicked leisurely at a small rock before speaking. He said, “I’m dying.”

  Barnes felt like he had skipped a step on his way down a flight of stairs. The jarring words stopped time and movement, and he had to place a hand on the hood of his truck.

  Call looked at Barnes and repeated, “I’m dying. That woman is my attorney.”

  “Why?” Barnes asked, then caught his question and asked, “What do you mean, You’re dying?”

  “I mean what I said—I’m dying.”

  “But of what?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. I’ll tell you everything when I’ve come to that point. I won’t die tomorrow or in the near future. But it’s not too far on down that trail.”

  “Does Ruth know?”

  “No. Not yet. I guess now I should tell her. She probably has me marrying that woman.”

  “I’m not certain exactly what to say.”

  “Then don’t say too much. And don’t mention this to Ruth. I’ll tell her in a day or so after I’ve got things settled in my own mind.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” Call placed his hand on Barnes’s shoulder and left it there a moment longer than was necessary for him to straighten. He rounded behind Barnes and walked to his house with a wave over his shoulder.

  Barnes drank from his Newcastle, swallowing hard. The day had been made warmer. The beer did not give any coolness nor quench his thirst.

  “Robert is a freelance husband,” Ruth said that evening after Grace had finished her dinner and left the dining room. Through dinner the conversation had remained off certain topics, pivoting primarily on Grace’s interest in dressing the dog, Harp, like a ballerina and in Barnes and Call’s discussion of the night’s baseball game on television. Ruth had mostly remained silent, and neither Barnes nor Call wanted to begin something that might end with Robert’s name or presence being called up.

  When Grace left the room, carrying her empty plate in front of her, however, the room emptied into silence. The walls pushed in and the table shortened, and Barnes felt his arms pull into his sides. Ruth broke the silence with her declaration about Robert’s transience.

  Call sat back in his chair at the head of the table. His hands rested flat and motionless, palms cupped on the table top. He pushed a toothpick around in his mouth with his tongue. Barnes finished his chicken fajita, his third, as Ruth began to speak.

  “He doesn’t want any lifelines. His primary goal in life is to be alone, with only his books. His only office, himself. No lifelines that way. Just read a book and write a paper. Look for life and adventure within the safety of bound pages. Pathetic.” She paused for a breath. “He thinks he takes a chance with life with those papers he writes. His greatest
goal is to create a new vocabulary, a critical methodology he calls it, that’s brand damn new. To him, that’s important, that’s life. He can’t live life or even write about life, he has to write about those who do. Pathetic. Well, to damn with him.”

  Call offered, sitting forward in his chair and removing the toothpick, “He fails to understand the connections.”

  “Connections,” Ruth echoed. She looked at Call, pressing him forward. Barnes could see that Call wished he had not said anything. But Ruth would not let him retract his words and kept looking at her father.

  “You are a lot like your mother,” Call said, and all at once Barnes saw in Call’s drawn face the face of an old man. “In this light and here in this room, with everything that she picked out for us, you look a lot like her. This table,” Call said, running his fingers across the surface. He stopped talking and Ruth did not push him. She allowed him to work into his memory. “We couldn’t afford this table, but we wanted it. We saw it downtown, and it was to be the first new thing we owned. And around this table we ate and fought and loved, and we fed you and changed your diapers here because when you came along we had no other table in the house. We scolded you and praised you and helped you learn to read and write here. Right here at this chair that Grace sits in you sat in, and I sat in this chair right next to you while your mother cleaned the dishes and walked by to look over your shoulder and make sure I was doing it right. And where Barnes is sitting is where she sat when she told me that she had cancer. And right here, I can see it like a stain, is where I cried. Those connections.”

  Ruth stood and walked behind Call. Sparks of light reflected from the tears in her eyes. She stood behind Call, who sat looking at his hands together on the table in front of him, and she kissed the crown of his head, then laid her cheek against it. She stood there for a moment, with her head resting on Call’s head and with Call looking silently down at the stains on the table that only he could see.