How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  She produced a short clip knife from a case on her hip, flipped it to him.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  She cocked her head, mockingly coy.

  “Just give me a minute to show you, baby.”

  She went over to where Emmanuel was chained, bent down and turned a key in the padlock. The clasp clacked open and she swiftly tugged the chain through the bolt. With the chain knotted around one hand and the handgun pointed at the back of Emmanuel’s head, she forced him to his feet. As they moved, she torqued down on his broken arm so that he had to obey the pain. Once she had him faced to Harrison with their chests nearly touching, she stopped.

  “You decide how this is going to happen,” she said. “You can make him go out real easy. I know you know how. You can see that pulse in his throat right now, can’t you? I swear it’s bouncing just like a trampoline.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “This isn’t a choice I’m offering you. Hell, this is mercy. If you don’t put him down right now by your own hand I will have that other mean motherfucker beat him to death while you watch and know there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”

  He couldn’t look Emmanuel in the eye. The blade had taken on a different weight. All the doors of his mind were flung open.

  “Cut him!”

  Instead, Harrison pushed hard against his own wrist and brought the edge across. His pale flesh opened with such ease that he felt no pain, marveled instead at the abrupt flow of red that in a delirious moment he believed might be a hue of paint.

  “What the fuck did you do!” she screamed.

  His head was coming undone and he couldn’t be sure what he was doing with his hands. There was a further darkness crowding in around the near darkness, but it caused no fear. It crowned everything he could see. The knife dropped from his hand. There was more screaming.

  She opened the lock and unwrapped the chain. She tried to close the wound with her hands but it continued to run. He saw her screaming in his face, though he couldn’t make out any words. Then, in moment when everything collapsed on itself, her eyes widened with surprise when Emmanuel stabbed the knife into the base of her throat and a second later ripped it across. She came to her feet as if she had been electrically shocked, her hands a useless dam against the life overspilling. She took only a few steps before she fell face down into the immediate nowhere. Emmanuel tore his shirt over his head, crying in pain as he brought his hurt arm free and pressed the balled material against Harrison’s wrist.

  “Hold this here, okay?”

  Harrison nodded, clutched the shirt in place. Emmanuel found the gun a few feet from Delilah’s body. He picked it up and moved toward the door with the lantern. Before he opened it he killed the light.

  His footsteps padded back a minute later.

  “Hey, you still with me?”

  “Barely.”

  “The other one’s down by the car. It’s maybe a hundred feet up the way, but I think there’s a trail the other way that gets us back up to the paved road. Can you move?”

  “Yeah, help me up?”

  Though Emmanuel bore the brunt of him, every step was exhaustion. But as soon as he was outside and could see Jonathan at the car smoking a cigarette, his physical weakness fled. Fear quickened him and he was able to mount the trail without Emmanuel’s help.

  They got to the side of the road and crossed over, careful to stay beyond the cast of streetlights. It was late and there were few cars out on this side of the river. Still, it was much too far to walk. Finally, they decided to cross at the bridge and make their way to the transit terminal. Just as they arrived, the night bus headed for Magnolia stopped and hissed. When the doors rolled open the woman behind the wheel took them both in, shook her head.

  “There’s rules about who I can take on the bus,” she told them.

  “Yes ma’am, we don’t need to go far.”

  “Honey, it looks like far is exactly where you two need to get.”

  She shook her head but waved them aboard, told them to sit far enough back so that she didn’t have to put up with their smell.

  As they rode through the next two stops they didn’t say anything to each other, their eyes on the night flowing around them like a shared nightmare. When they came to their stop, Harrison stood at the rear door but Emmanuel had remained seated. When Harrison touched him on the shoulder he began to weep. The bus driver glared at them in the mirror.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you need to get him off my bus right now, you understand?”

  He got Emmanuel up and down the exit steps. The doors rolled shut and the bus lumbered on. Harrison asked him to be quiet as he guided him through the narrow streets and back to the house. Once there he told him to pack everything he needed as fast as he could. In a couple of minutes he had put some clothes and a sheaf of papers in a small leather suitcase. Under his good arm he had the unfinished self-portrait. There was nothing else he needed, he said. Nothing else that he would give a damn if it burned to the ground.

  “Where’s somewhere we can go, somewhere safe until tomorrow?” Harrison asked.

  “I don’t know. Nowhere.”

  “There’s got to be somewhere, Emmanuel. Someone you can trust.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “My cousin Felicia. She’s up on the other end of Skyline Road.”

  Emmanuel unlocked the doors of his Cavalier and slipped behind the steering wheel. “Might need a team effort here,” he said, glancing at his busted arm hanging on the ignition side of the steering column. Harrison reached over and twisted the key until the engine caught, then eased the shift in reverse so Emmanuel could turn around and put them on the path toward any future better than the one that would find them here.

  34

  JONATHAN KNEW IT WAS TAKING TOO LONG. HE FELT SOMETHING sick settle into his stomach when the stopwatch on his phone clicked up to a quarter of an hour. He took the pistol out and circled around to enter from above so that he would have a clear sight of the situation. Even from there he could see that the lantern remained burning inside.

  He dropped down and kicked the door aside and saw her. He did not need to go any closer to know that she was dead, though there was nothing just then that could keep him from doing so. Once he cleared the rest of the room he holstered the handgun and then went forward.

  There was so much blood that it repulsed him. He had not expected that. He had not expected to be afraid of it as well as ashamed. Perhaps that was why he didn’t take her in his arms and instead simply registered the basic fact of her subtracted life. He wasn’t sad. Not exactly. He simply felt cheated, tricked.

  He sat on the concrete floor, drew his legs against his chest. Wondered at the immediate fact of her body being there but everything else not. He supposed that was where people got their religion, in this space that was a tease. Something should have been over there in that pile of bones, just as there should have been something filling his chest right now, though each was as empty as punch holes.

  He didn’t have any more time to bother with her, so he closed the door and padlocked a chain in place as guard over her tomb, went down to the car and drove out of the place and through the darkened city.

  The car was gone when he got to the house. He knew that it would be. Still, he went inside, checked each of the rooms to make sure there wasn’t something worth seeing left behind.

  He went back to the bedroom, opened all the closets. Stacks of paintings fitted against one another with thin diaphanous padding placed in between. He carried them to the bed and looked at them. Pictures of people and places, but they didn’t look real. Instead, there were bright swatches of color that seemed like they came from out of the eye rather than the thing between the frame. Was enough to make you dizzy if you looked at it too long. He didn’t have much of an idea what he was supposed to think of that. As a kid he remembered watching TV shows with people talking about what made something into art.
Seemed to him they were always talking in a way that sounded as though they knew some trick you never could. There was even one time a urinal was hung up in a museum and idiots came there and looked at it like it meant something.

  He got up on the bed and unzipped, pissed on the canvas then stamped his foot through until each painting had his own special signature on it. He hopped down and went back out to the living room.

  He sat on the couch and tried to think. He thought he should call Gavin, but he didn’t know how he might explain things. He thought too maybe he should run.

  No, he wouldn’t do that. Enough of his life had been finding the quickest exit. That kind of thinking wore on you after a while. He was tired of being worn down.

  He went back to the van and drove out of the neighborhood and headed back toward Little Europe.

  35

  FRANK’S VICTORY WAS ANNOUNCED JUST AS THE STORM HIT THE western edge of the county. There were jokes about omens and auspices, but the jokes soon died on the tongue when the emergency broadcast came over the radio, telling everyone to get inside and away from windows. Farewells were shouted as everyone took off for the prospect of better shelter. Kyle clapped Frank on the shoulder as he left, said to take care of his family while he and Laura headed back to his place on the mountain.

  Over the next half hour the wind tore across ridgelines and howled down the length of the valley. Trees bent and sheared. What had been forecast as essentially a string of thunderstorms had converged that afternoon as the front raced through the central part of the state. In that time they had become a solid squall line bearing down on the mountains.

  When the storm reached Carter County the sustained winds were above seventy miles per hour. The wind simply picked up the brush fire set by Polk at the edge of Little Europe and flung it across the river and up the shoulders and sides of the mountains in a matter of minutes. It was a rhapsody of flame. The firestorm detonated as abruptly as a bomb and the earth ruptured. Anyone could see that there could be no rescue, only escape.

  Kyle saw the fires as they came. After he and Laura had got back to the house they had sat up late, too excited by the election results to sleep. They were on the porch because they knew the winds were coming and they were ready to be thrilled by the spectacle, wanted to welcome it as something that matched their optimism about the future of the county. They had won the vote. The calamity that followed made no sense.

  “We need to call somebody,” Laura said, rushed into the house to find her phone.

  The smoke flung across the burn line. Kyle could hear the distant sound of trees cracking. The smell of it all was sharp and acrid. As the wind gusted again the inferno bounded closer.

  “There’s no signal,” she said, back now and staring at the oncoming firestorm.

  “Is there anything in there you can’t do without?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on, then. We need to get out of here before we get caught in the cove.”

  She didn’t need to be told to hurry.

  Once they reached the bottom of the drive and turned onto the dirt road there was a ridge between them and the advancing flames. But even though they lost direct sight of the fire, they could see the stuttering pulse glowing there above the mountain. They passed the fork in the road that would take them into town.

  Laura pointed at the missed turn.

  “Where are you going, Kyle?”

  “We’ve got to get up there to Orlynne’s. If they don’t get out this way they’ll be shut up in there.”

  He tore along the road faster than he ever had, felt his stomach flip each time the tires barked and skidded through a curve. His hands gripped the steering wheel like it was trying to throw him. The road became as much his enemy as anything or anyone ever had. It slipped through the night and it slipped through him, a destiny made up of dirt, rock, and calculated angles. All he wanted was to stay on it just a little longer.

  “Kyle, look!”

  He should have seen it earlier; he had been too tightly focused. The fire had gotten in through a saddle between the mountains and jumped the river. Both sides of the road in front were ablaze. He didn’t slow.

  “We can still get through. It’s not that much further.”

  They felt the heat before they even go to the fire. Laura closed all the vents but the smoke was still able to thread its way in. At the next turn everything got impossibly worse. Despite the unstrung chaos of all that burned around the truck, he could see the poplar begin to tilt in time to brake. A second later it crashed and blocked the road. The tree was too big to move, too big to cut even if he had the chainsaw. There was no room the turn around and the fire had encircled them.

  He threw the shift in reverse and plunged his foot on the accelerator. The heat and smoke and wilderness of light slipped away like beads along a string. It became only the rush of darkness once they were clear, and each of them had to consciously decide before they could breathe again.

  “Are you okay?”

  Laura nodded but couldn’t find her voice.

  “There’s still a way to get to them,” he said as they pulled up to the road fork. “I’ll just need you to run me back up to the house and then you can ride out this way.”

  She shook her head, told him she wouldn’t be separated from him. He had little appetite or time for argument, so he drove on.

  When they pulled up to the house they could see the fire had crawled and surmounted the big ridge. Ash blew across in gusts of warm snow. In half an hour everything under their feet would be burning.

  He dragged the canoe and its gear out into the open before Laura could get around and heft the back end.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get to the put-in. There’s a spot just up the road, though. It’s steep, but we should be able to manage.”

  “Should?”

  They carried the boat out to the truck.

  A few minutes later they were overlooking a granite sheer. In daylight it couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet to the water, but in the weird gloaming of firelight the distance magnified. They fastened their life vests and started down, tried to find footholds but it was all smooth and slick.

  “Go ahead and jump in. Be ready to stop it if I can’t hold on.”

  Laura turned and leapt into the pool.

  “Throw the paddles down,” she called up.

  He pitched them down a few feet from her. Though the light wasn’t good he could still see where they splashed and spun. She swam over and gathered them in her arms. He squared up and clambered toward the rocky edge, tried to keep his center of gravity as low as possible while he shoved the boat down in front of him, moved crabwise. He had extended the bow until it nearly touched the water when his feet lost purchase and he was over without a way to control his fall.

  When he came up in the river he stung all over, but it seemed to be mostly scratches and light cuts. Where they were, the water came to his chest, so they had to float the canoe down to the next set of shoals before they could climb in and get a better look.

  “Let me see,” Laura said once they were aboard, held his leg to view the wound, see if anything was embedded. The cut was clean, not significantly threatening.

  Laura moved forward and together they paddled for the main current. It pulled them in, still strong this far back despite the months of drought. The regular rhythm of work was good. It kept his mind off the pain in his leg. He tried not to think about Orlynne, about what they would find there at her trailer by the time it would take to cover this much distance, at least three miles, along the river. It was tempting to lay in with all he had but he knew that tiring out prematurely was a risk. There was also the river itself to keep in mind. Though he knew this run well, the fire would change things. As soon as they were past the fireline there would be the likelihood of falling and fallen limbs. Trying to paddle on too quickly could get them into problems because the rapids were still big enough in places to be a danger. Especially i
n the dark. No, he had to remain patient, keep a steady stroke and pilot them through. He settled in and gave himself over to the river.

  36

  FELICIA HAD NO INTENTION OF LETTING THEM THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR.

  “Come on. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t an emergency,” Emmanuel said through the chain-locked door. Harrison could see no more of her than a single glaring eye.

  “Emmanuel, you have got to be crazy turning up on my doorstep in the middle of the damn night with a crazy-looking cut-up white boy with you!”

  “Look, honey, look. There is too much for me to explain this to you, standing out here. Just let me in and I can set it all out for you.”

  “Don’t you honey me.”

  Despite her refusal, she paused, took a breath.

  “If I let you two motherfuckers in this house you better not wake up my kids. I swear to God I’ll cut you both down to the spine if you do. And you, white boy, don’t bleed on anything.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The door swung shut as she shot the chain free to let them in.

  There were admitted to a small front room with a closed-off fireplace and a big gilded mirror hanging above a yellow couch. Seeing himself reflected there, Harrison could understand her hesitancy to welcome him.

  “I know there’s got to be a reason you’re not wearing a shirt, Emmanuel, but I’m not even about to get into all that. And White Boy here looks like he should be in a hospital.”

  “His name is Jay.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn what his name is.”

  She shook her head, closed her eyes and asked her god for long-suffering patience.

  “We need to clean up.”

  She waved her hand in the air.

  “You know where the bathroom is. I’m going to need some damn wine.”

  She left them for the kitchen. Emmanuel told Harrison to follow and showed him back through the short hall, switched on the bathroom light and closed the door behind them.

  Harrison held his arm over the sink so that he could carefully remove the bloody shirt from his wrist.