Wildfire

by Rodman Philbrick

  “They come into my care after their momma passed. This yo daddy,” she says, touching one of the boys with her thumb. “James was his little brother, by less than a year. They both in heaven now.”

  I ask why my father ran away from home.

  “I expect he had his reasons,” she says, not meeting my eyes.

  “So his brother would have been my uncle, right?”

  “Had he lived, uh-huh, but he passed before you born.”

  “What happened?”

  “James got hissef killed, like so many other young mens.” The old woman shakes her head, eyes brimming with tears. “Later child. We talk on that bye and bye.”

  Fine by me. I was only asking because I thought she’d expect me to. “Got hissef killed,” though. Hear that and you can’t help wondering. If it was an accident, like happened to my dad, wouldn’t she say “died in an accident”? “Killed” sounds like somebody killed him, which makes me wonder how it happened, and who did it, and like that.

  But Trissy changes the subject. “So yo momma got her a job with the US Post Office. That good,” she says, sounding bright and cheerful again. “That a fine thing.”

  “My father did, too,” I tell her. “He was delivering mail when he got run over by the old—by the person that hit him.”

  “Uh-huh, yo momma said. Terrible thing. Terrible. By any chance do you like ice cream? There’s ice cream in the freeze box. Myself, I love ice cream.”

  That’s another thing I like about the old lady. When she wants to change the subject she usually mentions ice cream.

  When I was little, me and Mom went on vacation to a bunch of theme parks in Florida. One of the coolest rides was called “Back to the Future” and I liked it even though I hadn’t seen the movie yet, which I did as soon as we got home. It’s about this kid that goes back in time before he was born and tries to stop bad stuff from happening to his parents. A totally cool idea, even if it can’t happen in real life.

  Anyhow, that’s what it’s like at Miss Trissy’s house, like the airplane that took me to New Orleans went back in time, and everything is from fifty years ago. Her little kitchen is clean and shiny, but the appliances could be out of a museum, if they had a museum about old kitchens. The telephone is this big black thing with a rotary dial instead of buttons, and a receiver so heavy she has to lift it with both hands. The old tube-model TV only gets one blurry channel because Miss Trissy doesn’t have cable. Mostly she listens to gospel songs on an old table radio and sings along, which sounds kinda stupid but is actually sort of beautiful, once you get used to it.

  The other thing that’s like going back in time is that she doesn’t have AC. Air-conditioning might as well never have been invented, as far as Miss Trissy is concerned. She doesn’t believe in it, says air-conditioning will give you wetness of the lungs.

  “That’s what made me a widow,” she says. “Wet lungs took my poor husband Henry.”

  I almost say it was probably the heat killed her husband, but I don’t have the energy to smart-mouth. That’s how hot it is. And that’s mostly what I remember about the first three days in Smellyville. The heat that never stopped. How it was too hot to go outside in the daytime because the sun would hit you like a hot fist. I took Bandy out for his walks, of course, but we never went much farther than the empty lot at the end of the street because he’d whimper from the heat and want me to carry him back into the shade. Mostly he wanted to lie on his belly on the linoleum in the kitchen and pant and give me looks like the weather was all my fault.

  “Nothing I can do about the temperature, you silly dog. Want a treat? Does that help?”

  It usually does.

  In the evening, when it was a little cooler, we’d sit out on the wooden porch they call a “gallery” and drink sweet iced tea and Miss Trissy would tell stories from the old days, about when my father and his brother were little and they played Superman in this very yard.

  “That was they favorite—Superman, because he could fly. Don’t matter he was a white man, them two wanted to be Superman just the same. They tie towels around their necks for capes and stand on the gallery rail and make whooshing noises like they was flying. Gave me fits! What if they fell off and broke they heads? Couldn’t stop ’em, though. They was determined to be Superman, and when Henry, he my husband at that time, when Henry say there only one Superman, how can you both be Superman, they say Superman can be anything he wants, even two people. They was that close, them two. Peas in a pod.”

  I keep waiting for her to tell me what happened, how my uncle James got killed and why my father ran away, but she never quite gets to that part.

  “Bye and bye,” she says, “bye and bye.”

  That’s mostly all we do, really, is sit around and talk, because Miss Trissy is so old she doesn’t like to leave the house except to go to church. The true fact is, even though she turns out to be nice and all, it’s really pretty boring with no games and no TV, and I’m thinking only a few more days and this will be over and then school starts, which I’m sort of looking forward to, even though I’d never admit it to anyone.

  Saturday morning the old phone rings. Bandy starts barking and I’m shushing him when Miss Trissy hands me the receiver and says, “Oh my Lawdy. Yo momma, child.”

  Mom calls my cell phone every day, usually in the morning, and for the past couple of days she’s been concerned about this hurricane out in the Atlantic somewhere, which was supposed to be over once it hit Florida, but the weather channel has got her all riled up. Something about a bull’s-eye.

  “I tried your cell but it won’t go through! Too many calls, I guess, which is no surprise. The storm track changed! The storm didn’t die out like they thought. It came back to life when it crossed over Florida and hit that warm water in the Gulf. It got big—really big and now it’s a huge big storm, aiming straight for New Orleans. They say the storm surge might be twenty feet high! High enough to flood the whole city! You got to leave, Zaney. You and Miss Trissy, you’ve got to get out of there!”

  I explain that Miss Trissy doesn’t have a car, but of course Mom already knows. She has a plan, which is totally typical because my mom always has a plan.

  “You’re coming home,” she tells me. “You and Miss Trissy both. All you have to do is get to the airport. Can you do that?”

  Newbery Honor author Rodman Philbrick grew up on the coast of New Hampshire and began writing novels at the age of sixteen. As is often true of aspiring writers, Philbrick wrote for many years before finally publishing his first book. In fact, he wrote eight or nine unpublished novels for adults, and during those years, he also worked as a roofer, carpenter, longshoreman, and boatbuilder.

  Eventually he turned to the genre of adult mystery and suspense thrillers and published his first novel at the age of twenty-eight. Over the next dozen years, he published fifteen of them, several under a pseudonym.

  Freak the Mighty, Philbrick’s first book for young readers, was published by the Blue Sky Press/Scholastic in October of 1993. Among its many honors, the book won the California Young Reader Medal and was chosen by the American Library Association as a Best Book for Young Adult Readers. Now considered a classic, it has sold more than four million copies and was made into a 1998 Miramax movie, The Mighty. Philbrick wrote a sequel, Max the Mighty, because “so many kids wrote to me suggesting ideas for a sequel that I decided I’d better write one myself before someone else did.”

  Philbrick’s rip-roaring historical novel about an inveterate teller of tall tales, The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg, is set during the Civil War, and was a 2010 Newbery Honor Book. The Kennedy Center commissioned a theatrical production of the book, which premiered in 2012. Another novel that examines American history is Philbrick’s Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina, about Zane Dupree and his dog, Bandit, who are trapped in New Orleans just as Hurricane Katrina hits the city. This dramatic survival tale is both heroic and poignant, educating readers about an unforgettable catastroph
e. Among its many honors, Zane was on the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List.

  Always suspenseful and filled with fascinating details, Philbrick’s novels are also celebrated for their depth and heroism. The Young Man and the Sea is the powerful tale of a boy trying to save his grieving father by taking a desperate fishing gamble out at sea. School Library Journal praised its “heart-pounding suspense” and named it a Best Book of the Year. For young adults, The Last Book in the Universe is set in a dangerous future where reading and writing are a thing of the past, but when a young gang member discovers books, he sparks a rebellion. It was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a YALSA “100 Best of the Best Books for the 21st Century.” Philbrick’s 2016 The Big Dark, about social dysfunction that erupts after a solar flare wipes all electricity off the planet, was a “Recommended Page-Turner” by the Horn Book.

  From coast to coast, Philbrick engages young readers with stories about ordinary children who are suddenly faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles—and must summon up courage they don’t even know they have. For this ability to connect with readers, Philbrick’s books have been given awards and nominations by more than thirty-five states—often multiple times.

  For a number of years, Philbrick thought the devastating Great Fire of 1947, in which his home state of Maine burned from the mountains to the sea, would make an interesting subject for a survival adventure story. But the increasing number of wildfires nationwide convinced him to set the story in the present. After a period of research into how changing climate has made fires more frequent and more dangerous, he started writing Wildfire, in February of 2017.

  On November 8, 2018, Wildfire was in its final stage of editing. That day, massive wildfires broke out in California. The Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire both raged out of control, much like the wildfire that chases Sam. Many people lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes, and more. About this novel, and the rampant wildfires that are now being called “the new normal,” Philbrick says, “I wish this book was fiction, but it keeps coming true.”

  Rodman Philbrick currently divides his time between Maine and the Florida Keys.

  ALSO BY RODMAN PHILBRICK

  Freak the Mighty

  Max the Mighty

  The Fire Pony

  REM World

  The Last Book in the Universe

  The Young Man and the Sea

  The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg

  Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina

  The Big Dark

  Who Killed Darius Drake?: A Mystery

  Many thanks to my hotshot friends, Eric Metcalf, David Carr, and Teddy Bryan, for their fascinating accounts of fighting wildfires in the Bitterroot, in Montana.

  Copyright © 2019 by Rodman Philbrick

  All rights reserved. Published by The Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, THE BLUE SKY PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LCCN Number: 2018051703

  First edition, September 10, 2019

  Special thanks to Jazan Higgins, who cares so deeply about reading.

  Jacket illustration © 2019 by Zlatina Zareva

  Jacket design by Elizabeth B. Parisi and Maeve Norton Reinforced Binding

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-26691-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.