How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  “She’s right, you know,” Emmanuel said. “We do need to take you to a hospital.”

  “Which is the first place he’d check.”

  When the cloth separated from the injury, the smell of dry blood was so sharp it made him gag. Emmanuel ran a trickle of warm water from the tap and helped him clean and dry the cut. He opened three large padded bandages and overlaid them. Harrison circled adhesive tape around the wrist until the material was secure.

  “You need the doctor as bad as anyone,” Harrison said, softly grazing the bicep of Emmanuel’s hurt arm and kissing his shoulder. “But not tonight. I need you to stay here tonight.”

  “You need me to stay here? You told me we both were staying. What the hell are you up to now, Jay?”

  “I’ve got to get back there to where Gavin’s got that money. We’re going to need it if we have a chance of getting clear of everything. We already agreed I was going to do it.”

  “My God, that was before everything that’s happened tonight. Stealing from that man was always going to be dangerous, but now you’re going to try and do it while you’re walking around three pints light of blood? That’s crazy, even for you.”

  “I don’t have time for this argument right now.”

  He went back out to the front room where Felicia was sitting with her coffee cup of merlot.

  “Do you have duct tape?”

  “Duct tape? You want to start up home repairs to pay me for my kindness?”

  He held up his bandaged arm.

  “I might need something sturdier than this.”

  She pinched her eyes closed with her fingertips.

  “First drawer to the left of the dishwasher.”

  He went in and wrapped the tape several times around until his wrist was stiffly encased. He tore the tape with his teeth and smoothed over the end. Emmanuel had come out from the bathroom and was wearing a large yellow towel around his shoulders.

  “Don’t leave the house until I get back,” Harrison told him as he swiped the keys from where Emmanuel had dropped them on the coffee table.

  “If you get back, you mean.” Emmanuel said.

  Harrison hugged him, said, “No, that’s not what I mean at all.”

  HE DROVE the interstate with the speedometer notched on eighty. Any faster and he would have drawn the attention of state troopers, but this time of night they would let just about anything fly through east Tennessee. The mountains were dark for a while but there was some kind of strange light just beyond them. Harrison had no idea of what to make of it until he smelled the smoke. He angled his foot down and the road fled behind him.

  He first caught direct sight of the fires as soon as he exited for Elizabethton. The roads were a confusion of people driving away from town and several volunteer firefighters hurrying toward the blaze. There seemed to be no official coordination, only this general apocalypse.

  Once he was through town the highway out to Warlick had been blocked by deputies. He was stopped by one of them.

  “It’s all shut down through this way. It’s burnt clear up to Roan Mountain.”

  “I’ve got to get through. I’ve got to get to some people.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. All the people that are still up there are coming out on their own. Letting you through would just give us somebody else to worry about. I’m going to need you to turn around, please.”

  He rolled the window up, sat there a minute before he jerked the wheel hard and stomped the gas, bounded across the grass median until he was running up the incoming lanes that had been left open for evacuees. He heard shouts but no gunshots, so he drove on, moved to the emergency lane when he saw vehicles coming toward him. In this way, he slalomed back toward the cove and turned into the heart of the fire.

  The road was surrounded by the cracked red embers of what had already burned, everything blackened and baked by the violence that had run its course. He could feel the heat inside the car, heard something pop a second before the headlights flickered and died. He banged the dash to get them going, but it did nothing. He had to slow to little more than a walking pace, guided by the strangely mystic confusion of the firelight.

  When he finally reached Little Europe, he was amazed to see that it still stood. Everything around it was burned, devastated. But the old asylum remained there on the brow of the hill as if it were constructed and affirmed by the same force as the fire itself. It glowed with an odd but presiding beauty. He parked and went in to see who was still there.

  He moved through the foyer and noiselessly up the stairs. Along the hall on the second floor, several of the rooms had been left open and there was no one inside. They must have had ample time to get clear. They must have known. He paused at the room he had shared with Delilah, pressed the door open on a hinge that moaned. There were some things of hers there. A blouse and a box of pictures of her with her brother. It was almost like there had been a soul in her body. He got the rest of the cash and his extra revolver from the closet. He stuck it in the back of his waistline next to the other one, the one Delilah had meant to kill him with, then he went on toward Gavin’s room.

  He opened the door and saw Gavin sitting at the window looking out at the fires. He was in his office chair, one leg cocked casually across the other, as if he were viewing a scene of outdoor theater instead the loss of everything he’d tried to build. A few feet across from him sat the idiot boy Connor Polk slumped in an oak stiff-backed chair, his forehead punched with a bullet hole. The ostensible source, a Smith and Wesson automatic, lay just within Gavin’s reach on the windowsill.

  “I wondered if you would come back,” Gavin said. “I hoped you would.”

  Harrison circled around and rested his weight against the edge of the heavy desk.

  “What happened?” Harrison asked.

  “I lost my temper, I’m afraid. He was the one responsible for the fire. At first he wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell he wanted to lay claim to something of import. It wasn’t just that, though. He threatened me. Told me he was going to take the money he knew I had hidden here, and that if I didn’t give it to me he would throw me out into the wildfire. I believed him. It looked as though the house was going to burn. So, I told him I would give him what he wanted. I opened the safe and he wasn’t worried about what I might do. He thought I was weak. In his mind there was no reason for concern. I simply pulled the gun out and pulled the trigger. I was going to do the same to myself. I have no desire to burn alive, but as I sat here, trying to come to terms with things, the wind changed. It carried the fire away from here. There was no reason for it, only chance. So I’ve been sitting here thinking about that and then you walked in the door and I wonder if that’s maybe the reason all of this has happened. Just so we can have a conversation.”

  Harrison could see the safe remained open and that the stacks of cash were still there.

  “What kind of conversation would that be?”

  “One where we tell the truth. I think that’s something we owe one another at this point.”

  “From where I stand, it seems like each man has his own idea about what that means.”

  “Doubtless that’s the case. But there are certain shared entanglements that can’t be ignored. We were part of something here. You and I, even this poor dead fool. We ventured something.”

  “I was just trying to find a way to make a little money, get back on my feet.”

  Gavin shook his head, smiled.

  “No, that’s too easy. It’s understandable to hear you say that, though. I think it’s common for us to deny what we did and why we did it, especially here among the ruins. I will tell you what I think. I think you liked discovering your strength. You liked that you could build a reputation for yourself. You were valuable in a way that even I couldn’t see at first. But you held the secret of your own value and that made you see that we were able to give something back to you that held meaning. It must have confused your cynicism. You understand violence in this way,” he said, motioned tow
ard Polk’s body, “but I understand it too, though in a different key. I understand what it accomplishes in the mind, when it degrades and renders men worthless. Because I have fought against that kind of violence my entire life.”

  Harrison watched the fire heave in the distance.

  “You think you’ve made a difference,” Harrison said. “But I don’t see that anything has changed. People die, but there’s nothing new in that. There’s nothing that won’t keep them from doing the same tomorrow and the day after that. They die because that’s what happens when there’s no way around the suffering. Everyone knows that, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. You can say it’s because of the Blacks and Jews and Mexicans, but you might as well blame it on the weather. We all just want to find a way to ease the everyday hurt. So, yeah, maybe there’s a part of what you said that’s true about me. It helped to have a place here, but this isn’t where I want to be anymore, and it sure as hell isn’t who I want to be anymore.”

  Gavin reached for the handgun, though he did so without intent. He merely held it between flattened palms, as though it obstructed a properly composed prayer.

  “I know you came for the money. You should take it. We couldn’t have gotten it without you. The idiot here had no right to it. None of the others did.”

  Harrison eased from the desk, advanced without reaching for a weapon. He shifted the cash into the gym bag he’d brought from his room. When the bag was full he had to pinch the top together so that he could zip it shut. He walked toward the door without a glance in Gavin’s direction.

  “Harrison?”

  “What, Gavin?”

  “I hope you know I only wanted to make our world better.”

  Harrison shut the door and walked down the hall. A second later the handgun fired. Harrison heard Gavin’s body strike the floor.

  He grabbed a backpack from his room and filled a bottle with water from a bathroom tap, drank it to the bottom then filled it again and put it with the rest of his things. He hurried out to the car and tossed the money and other effects in the passenger’s seat, cranked the engine and swung back for the dirt road that led out of the cove.

  He turned to take one last look at Little Europe, impress it on his memory so that he could recall with clarity what he had escaped. Perhaps on any other night he could have seen what approached. But amid the flame he had missed the disturbance, the oncoming rush, as the white van slammed broadside into the car and smashed him into a wall of scorched earth.

  37

  HOLSTON HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT. THE ABSOLUTE magnitude of everything. Ash sifted down from what burned on the ridgelines and settled on the streets like an awful dry snow. He struggled getting all of his off-duty deputies to report in. They were scattered over the county and trying to beat back toward town so that he could put some kind of evacuation plan in place. The worst was the sheer chaotic noise of conflicting information. He would hear that one cove was completely destroyed or closed off only to learn fifteen minutes later that traffic was still flowing through there and that it was the next cove over that had been burnt. It got to be so bad that he didn’t trust any single report unless he could confirm it with his own eyes. He headed out to discern the truth from rumor.

  The highway checkpoints were manned, at least. He stopped by and told them to turn around any traffic trying to go past Hampton. He went through himself and turned toward Warlick, where the fire gouged the top third of the mountains. He rolled down his windows and could hear it talking even above the howl of his engine.

  The wind had temporarily quieted. Little chance that would hold, but maybe the reprieve would allow people the few critical minutes they needed to get to a paved surface. The worst of it would be for those who lived down the back dirt and gravel roads, hemmed in with no way out. Since that was where the worst trouble was bound to be, he turned into the first hollow he came across.

  The smoke made him slow. It camouflaged the advance of the flames, though, and he couldn’t be sure how close to danger he might be getting. He was cussing the lack of visibility when a shape appeared abruptly a few yards ahead and he had to mash the brakes to keep from rear ending the tail of a pickup parked in the middle of the road. A tree had come down and landed across the hood. He recognized it immediately as belonging to Frank Farmer. Sickness welled within him.

  He got out and cried Frank’s name, though he doubted his voice carried far. He saw that the cab was empty. He couldn’t call the sight of that relief, but it was better than the dread it replaced.

  “That you, Holston?”

  It was Frank coming from up the road. He had his chainsaw under his arm and he sweat like a man who had been spat from the belly of damnation. Next to him was one of those boys Pettus had in the veterans group.

  “I’m afraid your truck is stuck, Frank.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  Frank told him he had gone up the road to clear the way with the chainsaw and heard the tree come down less than ten seconds from when he’d stepped from the cab. He could get the tree off, he said. But the engine was smashed beyond repair.

  “We need to get back through here, Holston. There’s got to be a dozen homes back here. Most of them won’t have any other way out.”

  “Hell, I know it. Hop in my truck. Let me run you up and you can work your way through a little quicker, at least.”

  Frank nodded and hurried back to the sheriff’s vehicle.

  They came to another downed tree a couple of hundred feet up the road. It was pine, at least. Should cut fast. Frank worked as close to the burning end as he could stand, let the heavy saw urge its way through. The trunk snapped and before he could set chainsaw aside Holston and the veteran boy were there, swinging it to the side like a gate. Without a word, they got back in and went on, moved like that through three more blockades before they got to the first house.

  “This is going to take all night, Frank.”

  “Good thing I don’t mind your company, Holston.”

  Despite everything, the sheriff couldn’t stifle a laugh.

  “Good damn thing.”

  FRANK WORRIED the heat was getting to Sheriff Holston, so he told him to stay in the cruiser while he and Turner worked up to the next line of burning trees. They still had at least half a mile more to cover, and he knew they were running out of time. He didn’t need the look on Turner’s face to tell him that. This was the cove he and the boy had worked just a few days before, talking to Turner’s uncle Virgil and so many of those others that he claimed as kin. The boy’s family was penned up there behind this wall of fire.

  Frank knew they had to pace themselves if they had any chance of making it all the way back. He set the saw aside and tried to survey how many more road obstructions they would face before the next road bend. Before he could tell Turner to wait, the boy had set the saw and started in on a canted oak, but the angle was bad and the blade got pinched. They worked at it for a couple of minutes, but neither of them could get it to budge.

  “Leave it,” Frank told him. “We ain’t going to get it out now. We’re going to have to go on foot from here.”

  He went back to the police cruiser to tell Holston what they needed to do.

  “No way, Frank,” Holston said. “You’ve got a wife and two little girls back in town. You don’t have any business going any further than you already have. Get in the car.”

  Frank smiled, placed his hand on the top of the cruiser.

  “Are you detaining me, Sheriff?”

  “I damn well should. Come on now, and get that crazy kid to come with you.”

  But Frank turned and he and Turner went up toward the gathering smoke.

  38

  THE SCENE SURROUNDING ORLYNNE’S TRAILER WAS BATTLE STREWN. Exploded and flame-guttered trees and still-burning second growth. Smoke that rolled and obscured any clear view of what may have survived. Kyle steered the canoe into a shallow notch in the bank until the bottom ground to a stop in the mud, told L
aura to stay with the boat until he could see what had become of Orlynne and Gerald.

  Once up the bank he could see the trailer had been partially burned but remained intact. The fireline nearest to it shot flat yellow flames more than a dozen feet from the ground, and even as far as the river the heat on his face was enough to draw sweat. He saw each of Gerald’s goats dead at their stakes. It looked as though they had been put down with gunshots. He called Orlynne’s name, but he heard nothing in response. Bracing himself, he sprinted the gauntlet of smoke and fire until he got to the trailer door and swung it open. Inside, he found them lying in bed clutching each other. In one of Gerald’s hands a small pistol was held. For a moment, Kyle thought that he had been too late, but Orlynne opened her eyes and lifted her head.

  “Kyle?”

  He told them he was there to get them, that he had his canoe at the river’s edge. He told them to hurry. They got to their feet and staggered toward him. They moved with awkward, hectic newborn jerks, their bodies having to freshly remember life when only moments before they had been prepared to resign themselves to its end. Kyle steadied them at the threshold of the door.

  “I’ll take Orlynne first, Gerald. Then I’ll come back for you.”

  Gerald nodded, told them to hurry up for god’s sake and not spend so much time with wasted words.

  Kyle drew Orlynne tight against his side and encircled his arm around her mouth and eyes to try to keep the smoke out as they limped to the canoe. She kept his pace and they pressed through. Laura was out of the boat, reaching her hand up for Orlynne to take. Once he was sure she was down the embankment and aboard, Kyle rushed back for Gerald. When he got back to the trailer he found the old man doubled over, coughing with such violence that it seemed to be ripping through his chest. Kyle grabbed him by the bicep and dragged him forward. They had only managed a few steps when Gerald’s entire body seized as if touched against a massive electrical charge. A moment later his legs went from under him. His eyes were rolled. Kyle hunkered down until he could gather Gerald across his shoulders and carry him out.