Authors: Colum McCann
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A summer of fires, that summer of 1956. They licked their way salaciously through the trees. Ran like lizards alongside ridges. Leaped their way over brown streambeds, languished for a while by new ditches and blackened the yellow hardhats that were left hanging on the branches of trees, tongued their way out towards the northern corners of the forest, were beaten back by Delhart and his rows of men, all of whose teeth became the shade of smoke. The fires settled down for a day, then whipped up again with a single cinder carried on the wind. At night the sky was lit up. The east was dappled with orange and the smoke took on different shades, pink and yellow and red, like so many different slices of skin, as if an aurora borealis had decided to stay for a while, to hang on that part of the world, propped up by the mountains, the low rivers, the generous orange violence.
In the forests frightened animals broke for cover. The carcass of a Rocky Mountain elk was found near a fire break, its burnt jaw opened in blackness. An escaping grizzly was shot on the main street of a northern town, lumbering madly on the footpath when it was circled down into the sight of a rifle. After a dozen bullets it fell, letting out a huge desultory cry that was imitated by a madwoman who stood on the corner by a feed store. She screamed so loud that it was said that she tore her larynx to bits. My father was hanging around down by the café and his photo shows her with her arms upstretched towards heaven. Her cry must have echoed its way around the town’s Sunday-morning church services, as ‘Amen!’ after ‘Amen!’ rang around the pews and preachers searched in the Book of Revelations for words about fires and the blue-hot end of the world. Mouths opened up in hymn as army helicopters flew overhead with bags of water meant to douse distant flames.
Boys made hatbands from the dehydrated snakes – timber rattlers and hog-noses – found at the side of forbidden forest roads. They sliced the snakes open longways with their fathers’ penknives, skinned them, wore them around their heads as a ritual that signified their stance at the cusp of manhood – another fire about to break. Rocks cracked open in the extraordinary heat. Firs brittled down to stumps. A box of lost bullets exploded near the edge of the forest, the echoed thump of them flushing men from their houses. At night, prayers were remembered by bedsides, and wives tenderly kissed their husbands’ foreheads as they went out the door, yellow jackets hung in the crook of their hands, leather belts carved with their initials around their waists, husband and wife stretching out from one another on an expanding waistline.
An old rancher down by the creekbed refused to leave his stockman’s cabin and went up like a Buddhist – the body was taken out on a makeshift stretcher, the flesh of the hands melted into the stomach where he had folded them in anticipation. His grey hair had vanished. The burnt man’s funeral was postponed for two mornings as sirens sounded out, summoning men to other fires. When it eventually took place, tired men leaned their heads forward on pews and wept secretly into Sunday handkerchiefs. For the wake, jugs of lemonade were laid on white picnic tables in the brown grass outside the church, and children played with buckets of water, splashed each other. A pall hung over the town. Women leaned against wireless radios to see if the fires had made national news. Buzzards rose and wandered in the alpine air, flapping continuously – sometimes the sky was black with them, descending like so many priests to a Eucharist below.
My father hung around with Delhart and the firefighters. He told them that he was on commission from a New York magazine – in fact, he’d been fired before he had a chance to begin. On the phone they said that they had hired another man. ‘Right-y-o,’ he said, his throat dry. He got drunk in a town bar that day, drowning both sorrow and a slight elation at the freedom of it all. The young barman, with lemon-coloured hair, had made a special drink for the firefighters, The Bloody Blazer, with a touch of tabasco in it. I can imagine the old man, sitting at the bar counter, taking it down in big gulps, bitter at the thought of losing his chance because his wife happened to like this place, wanted to stay. The drinks, I’m sure, stung the back of his throat, rocked through his belly. He sat with the other men around the bar as they coughed up into bandanas, ditch diggers on an afternoon off, fingers blistered from shovels. Hard men, they were democratically diligent at the buying of rounds. They must have regarded the old man as a foreigner at first – the early photos of them have a comical rigidity, you can almost feel the teeth clenching as they stare into the lens, their features just about recognisable in the windowlight from the bar, smudges of black obscuring their cheekbones.
Every morning the old man descended the mountain to where he kept a bicycle propped up against a fir tree, rode the seven miles to town with cameras strapped around him. The young boys in their snakeskin hats sometimes followed him and stuck out their bony chests when his lens moved towards them. After a while, the rangers and firefighters relaxed for his camera, regarded it with a mixture of off-handedness and anticipation. In solitary shots, he laid a white sheet at their feet, bounced the light up to give them harsh shadows on their faces, while they pretended they weren’t interested, hung their heads and rubbed ash-black hands together. They called him ‘Irish’ because that was what he still exuded – the retreating curls, the green eyes, the big shoulders moving under white shirts. He began to give himself over to that summer, my father, raging along with it all, catching the fires in their magnificence and brutality, even thanking Mam for her foresight in wanting to stay there – these were his best pictures, he was sure of it, they’d make him famous, he had no doubt.
Delhart was the only one who never wanted a photo taken. His face was not unlike the shovels of the ditch diggers – long and brown and weathered and too well used. Delhart hated cameras, had hated them ever since the Depression, when a photographer had gone through his town. He had been very young, and the photographer had gotten him to take off his shirt and show his distended belly. Delhart’s mother had ripped the photo to bits when it came out in a book years later, bought up all the copies she could find, burned them in a wood stove.
‘You can see around ya with your eyes, can’t ya?’ said Delhart. ‘No sense in using that thing.’
My father simply nodded, said nothing.
Delhart moved like a war general around the fires – the movement may have kept his mind off his problems. Whisperings abounded that he had gotten the Indian girl pregnant. Someone had seen him digging a fire ditch at the back of her house to protect her, but nobody brought it up, it was a sensitive issue, a ranger with a native American girl. Little was known about her because she never spoke to anybody, but there were rumours, and the rumours grew with her silence. Her speechlessness was attributed to having had her tongue cut out at a reservation in Utah, in punishment for her doing the same to a dozen magpies. Or her father had been a medicine man who had mistakenly caused her voicebox to burst with a potion. Or she had eaten the bones of squirrels and they had stuck in her throat. It was said that her name was Eliza. Her eyes were dark and hollowed, like someone who had suffered, but there was a beautifully fluid quality to her movements, as she hoed the soil in the back of her cabin. Some said she was a prostitute, but when men went to pay her a visit, she took a shotgun from behind the door and silently threatened them with it.
Delhart said nothing about either Cici or the Indian girl, but the old man had seen a copy of Cici’s book under the driver’s seat of Delhart’s truck, the beige-coloured spine cracked, all sorts of recent sootprints on the pages. He figured that Delhart was still in love with Cici and that things would eventually work out, but kept his musings to himself.
Cici brushed the thought of Delhart aside, and developed a vague and manic sparkle in her eyes. She and Mam leaned into the radio, pinpointing co-ordinates on giant brown maps, looked out over the fires, reported them to rangers below. ‘Shit, girls, you’re lucky, it’s a madhouse down here.’ The lookout and the mountain stayed intact. Smoky skies drifted by. The heavy wooden door creaked and groaned. Boiling water on their small stove, my mother swore that she could hear the bubbles bouncing off one another. It took ages to boil at that high altitude. Her own breathing came back to her in soft, regular patterns. While Cici wrote her poems, Mam went walking outside. The days stretched out on elastic, time passing with the rhythm of silence. And the silence collapsed into itself – a falling pebble on the scree, a cicada beating the plates of its abdomen, a call on the radio, a deer nudging up to the salt block down near the treeline, an insect moving in the outhouse, all of it became part of the quietness. Even the pine needles down in the forest broke with a brittle roar when she stepped upon them. The outhouse rustled with spiders, and when lime or ashes were thrown down to stifle the smell, flies rose up from the bottom.
In the tower an immaculately clean horse’s skull was nailed on the wall, looking down over an iron cooking stove, one chair, a table, a bed, a few cupboards, a rucksack frame. Other lookouts from previous years had scrawled graffiti on the walls. For a joke a spiralling staircase was nicknamed ‘Yeats’ after the gyre of his poems. Cici wrote a letter of his name on every second step. She laughed that she climbed Yeats every morning, rattled him, swept him clean, descended him with her binoculars in hand, perched on him and read, ran her hand along his banisters, stood in the middle of the ‘A’ and made her pronouncements to the world.
Cici and Mam took in the relative humidity of the world, the maximum and minimum temperatures, the quickness of the wind, the speed of the clouds, the upkick of dust, the possibility of more blazes, radioed them back to the headquarters. The distance of a storm was measured by counting the seconds between lightning and the receipt of the thunder blast. And it was up those stairs, surrounded by reams of graffiti, that Cici wrote her poems, reading them from the staircase when she was finished. Mam enjoyed her friend’s wild rantings, the sounds thrown out around the tower, laid her head on Cici’s shoulder, listened.
At first all three of them slept on the same floor, like a row of coloured biscuits in their sleeping bags. But Cici went crazy over her writing one night – she hadn’t put a word down in three days and she stalked around the tower, ripping up pieces of paper and throwing them around. ‘What the hell are you guys here for, anyway? Get away! Get out of here!’ My parents took their sleeping bags outside and heard the faint echo of high-pitched rants from within the tower. Every now and then Mam went up to make sure there wasn’t another episode like the water trough. She still half-expected to see Cici dangling from a rope above a kicked chair, the manic sparkle having its own darkness.
Cici apologised the next day, but my parents grew to enjoy those cold nights outside, where swarms of insects sang. The old man set up a small camp for them down near the treeline, fashioned an elevated platform from some pine poles, frapped it with red twine. Only when the lightning was bad did they stay in the tower. A small stepladder led up to a five-foot-high platform that creaked when they walked upon it. Mam climbed down in the mornings, isolated the sounds, gulped them down, let the air rush over her body. Some photos were taken when the sun came up, my mother unclothed once more, but more subtle, more precise around the edges than the ones from Mexico. There was one of her simply lying in a rope hammock, her body meshed into a series of diamonds where the ropes were tied, one knee raised slightly in the air to cover herself, a bandana tied around her hair; another of her pulling on a pair of forest-ranger trousers which my father had borrowed from Delhart, with her surprised by the camera, breasts exposed, mouth in the shape of a lemon; and one sitting in a blouse and underwear, propped up against a tree, eating a sandwich, watching the weather, gazing around as if there wasn’t a fire for miles.
Cici told me that, from a distance, she watched some of those photos being taken, and she envied my mother the use of her love. At times, despite herself, Cici still thought of Delhart and his boat-hands, let them row her through blackened trees and things that roared up from the pieces of fizzling sap.
* * *
Got to thinking about Cici again today while the old man was chasing his fish down there.
In San Francisco she was ensconced in a flat near Castro Street, on the third floor. I walked up the stairs, nervous, the backpack pulling against my shoulders. The walls of the apartment building were freshly painted, and a kid in short pants was sniffing at them. The sound of a distant piano rolled through the apartments. A cactus plant had been overturned in the hallway, bits of rock strewn around it. I sidestepped the pebbles, knocked on her door, introduced myself. She let me in, past a mountain of junk letters at her feet, as if she had known me all her life.
‘How did you find me?’
‘Dialed information,’ I said.
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.’
‘Oh, God, of course I would,’ she laughed, ushering me in further, silver bracelets jangling on her wrist.
I looked around. A mirror on the wall wasn’t generous to her. Her hair was quartzite-grey, flecks in it, her face the same colour. I dropped my backpack on the floor. Doodles ran along the margins of a newspaper, happy faces in a row down the page, in red ink. Some macaroni was caked on the inside of a saucepan left lying on the floor.
‘I brought you some flowers.’
‘Aren’t you just lovely?’
‘Do you have a vase?’
She didn’t reply. She looked at the ceiling: ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.’
‘Have you heard from her?’ I asked.
She looked at me curiously. ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Say, that’s a heavy bag you’ve got there.’
‘Been travelling a while.’
‘Hey, why don’t you just stay here with me forever?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Forever and an extra day.’