‘I like him,’ Rachel says.
‘Oh yeah, baby? You like Miles?’
‘Miles?’ The child stops and stares up at her mother. ‘I like
Stump
, Momma. Stump licked
me
.’
All of Ross River has gone to bed, though many, tonight, cannot sleep.
Some wonder about the woman and girl who had come all the way here only to walk with the fire chief around town like tourists with a guide. One sees an animal’s eyes peering out from the closet. One wishes the self-pitying child’s wish to never have been born.
Another cannot believe it was only this morning. Both his waking mind and dreams confirm it. Only this morning he was thinking the firestarter’s thoughts. Whether he lies with eyes open or closed, he lives through the same hours. When he comes to the end he can only return to the beginning to live them over again.
He lies awake through the night, certain he can smell it. A lick of heat. Barbecued pine. Sulphur curling his nosehairs. A memory of fire in place of fire itself. He knows this even as he sits up all at once and fights to reshape his gasp into a yawn.
He assumed that creating the firestarter would be a convenience. A temporary alter ego that would allow him to return wholly to himself after he was finished with it, cut free like a booster rocket once gravity has been defeated. Instead, the firestarter clings to him. In fact, he can feel the beginnings of a struggle, another’s hand on the wheel. It is still weaker than he. Thoughtless and mute. But it has a desperate tenacity he hadn’t expected, an unmanageable weight. It threatens to take him down with it like a drowning dog.
He thinks of what he would give in dollar terms to sleep without dreams until morning. Starts at two-fifty and soon approaches everything he has.
It’s not guilt. Not exactly. It’s not yet worry, either. Tonight, what denies his rest is what the firestarter would say to him if it ever learned to speak.
Even from four miles off, during the few hours of a July night’s darkness, the bear can smell Ross River before she spots the orange glow of its homes. Melted lard, yeast, the generator’s dizzying fumes. All of it attracts her, so much stronger in its promises than the highbush cranberries and wild sweet pea, the only other food she can detect in the vicinity. They have been moving continuously for a full day without eating, and now hunger sharpens her senses as do the distant traces of smoke that have been pursuing them the whole time. She allows her cubs to rest, rolled back on their haunches, chewing at air. The three of them have made their way to the top of a rock outcropping that pokes through the treeline, midway up the slope of the Tintina Trench.
The sow has been here before. Last autumn, with her mate. It’s how she knows that, in daylight, they could see the entire Pelly valley from where they are. Now, with the dawn only a blue thread atop
the horizon, the killing ground is a field of shadow. Below them, the town throbs in electric flames.
She doesn’t fear the people she knows to be there, but unless she has to, she will go no closer. It would be easy to push through one of the many breaks in the fence around the dump and feast on whatever spilled out of the piled bags she gutted. During the summer her mate stayed with her (far longer than other wandering, rutting boars), they would come here from time to time. The decision arose less out of necessity than as an addiction to the landfill’s exotic pleasures. On the rare occasions that the dump manager came by to throw the beam of his flashlight over one of them, the other would bark from the opposite direction, diverting his attention. The beam leapt blindly in his hands. In seconds the sow and her mate would be through the fence.
But there is only the cubs with her now. They have never been close to people, and she wonders if their curiosity would cause them to pause, blinking at the light. She has seen this hypnotism used on other animals by hunters in the woods at night. No amount of barking could wake them once the dazzling bulb had captured their eyes.
They will not go closer to town. They will not run any farther away either. Over the other side of the range to the south is a river that, by now, will be running with easily scooped grayling and trout. And here, in the St Cyr foothills, they are the only bears. Whatever food is available will be theirs without competition. She looks at her cubs. It will
be another year before they will begin to make these calculations on their own, and for a moment, the thought of the time ahead exhausts her.
She lifts her snout and turns to the east in the direction they have come from. The cubs do the same. The oddly stringent smoke is still there. Stronger than the hour before. Though it hasn’t moved, the sow feels that it wants to. And when it does, it will come this way.
In the morning, Miles stands in the shower until the hot water in the tank goes dry, and after it does, stands a while longer under the cold. It doesn’t make him feel clean as much as raw, a layer of skin peeled off, leaving him tenderized. Sometimes it helps him to think. Today, the water draws all thought out of him, washing half-formed sentences down the drain. By the time he turns off the taps he’d be slow in coming up with his birthday, his postal code. When he steps out of the stall the only thing he recognizes is Stump’s tongue licking his legs.
Beyond the bathroom window the morning sun is so bright it looks to Miles like the prolonged flash of some distant megaton explosion. And maybe it is. It is a summer of fire everywhere but here.
Even in a place as disconnected as Ross River, the images of disaster have found their way to him. On the TV hanging from chains in the Lucky China’s ceiling, he has crunched and tartar-sauced his way through lunch while watching evacuations
of famous ski villages and less-famous pulp towns on the lower mainland of British Columbia, the ruin of Washington State vineyards, flames licking against million-dollar glass cubes terraced over the hills of San Bernardino and the Simi Valley. Crews from as far as Ohio, Minnesota and Georgia have been dispatched to assist on the suburban infernos of Oregon and California. Reporters can’t get through a story without speaking of it, with a grimness only half disguising their excitement, as ‘possibly the worst wildfire season in living memory.’ Every time they use the phrase, Miles can’t help wondering whose living memory they’re talking about. He’s still alive. They should ask him sometime.
That the fires are so vast that smoke has been carried on the prevailing winds to redden the sun as far east as Winnipeg and St Louis might surprise some of the experts, but not Miles. He has seen a summer like this one coming for a long time. Global warming. Continental drought. Fuel loading. The last of these being the biggest factor. After years of urban sprawl and ‘development’ of what remains of the western forests, fighting fires has become more necessary in order to protect man-made values. The trouble is, the more smokers you put out, the more deadwood there is to blow up the next time around. Fire doesn’t like being made to wait.
When he’s dressed, Miles walks out to the main road and along the half mile to the fire office. The
morning light continues to dazzle him, glinting off anything it can find, even the gravel, white as chalk. The rust-stained tin of the fire office looks as though it’s been painted silver overnight.
Miles had expected the place to be empty, but King is already there, sipping at a mug of instant coffee. When Miles walks in he barely turns. Dreamy. That’s what the kid is. Which makes him a little dangerous, too.
Patrick ‘King’ Lear is this year’s part-timer sent up from the University of Northern British Columbia’s forestry management program to fill out the crew. He’s not the worst that Miles has seen, a physically strong boy who obviously loves the bush and, like Miles, sees firefighting as a way to get paid for living in it. But there’s an absence about King that made Miles at first suspect the kid was on drugs of some sort, one of the new kinds that make you rapturously amazed by everything. Now, he has come to believe that this is simply King’s nature. What’s worrying is that, on a burn site, it’s not exactly the optimum mental state for your men to be in. Crookedhead may not be any better on the raw intelligence side of the ledger, and Jerry is always looking for a way out of the hottest or heaviest work, but at least their defects are predictable. With King, you can’t tell when he might stop clearing deadwood or hacking out a fireline, hypnotized by the beauty of embers floating through a stand of aspens. Miles can only thank Christ that there hasn’t been
a fire of any substance for the length of his tenure as supervisor. They’re good men. He cares for them more than he’s comfortable admitting. But Miles would prefer to not see them tested by anything bigger than the bonfires of discarded mattresses they practise on out at the dump on Sundays.
‘King,’ Miles says.
‘Hey there, boss.’
‘You looked at the morning spotter reports?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Not a thing?’
‘It’s almost weird. There’s smokers in every district but ours.’
‘And the towers—?’
‘Aren’t seeing anything but a sunny day.’
‘How nice.’
Miles looks at King and, for the first time, sees a younger version of himself in the hard brow, the blue, elsewhere eyes. He wishes he hadn’t. And in a sense, he hadn’t—King doesn’t really look like Miles, not in the way you would ever confuse the two. It’s only that King’s self-containment, his distracted temperament that disguised something you might not want to get too close to, makes Miles think that those may well be the same impressions he leaves with others.
‘I sent Mungo to check on you last night,’ Miles says.
‘Three sheets to the wind, and
he’s
checking to see if
I’m
awake.’
‘I wanted to get him out of the bar more than anything else. I was hoping that once he’d said hello to you, he’d find his way home to say hello to Jackie.’
‘You’re a man with a plan.’
‘Always.’
Miles says this and hears its emptiness in his chest.
‘Speaking of plans, I was looking for you yesterday,’ King says.
‘What for?’
Wanted a sign-off on the pumper to do a training session. But you weren’t around. The pumper was gone, too.’
‘I went for a drive.’
‘A drive?’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s just strange. It’s a strange thing to—’
‘Don’t do this. It’s not the right day.’
King raises his hands in surrender.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ Miles says. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour and call the crew, get them out of bed so they can be here by the time I get back. Start with Mungo. He takes the longest.’
‘Absolutely,’ King says, returning his attention to the coffee mug on the table. ‘But there might not be anything for them to do when they get here.’
‘You never know in this business,’ Miles says, and slaps the kid on the back hard enough to
make them both wonder if it was a friendly gesture or something else.
The Welcome Inn Lounge is empty except for Bonnie, who slams beer bottles into cases behind the bar, and Miles regrets coming in this way to look for Earl, the innkeeper. Bonnie pops her head up, a you’re-not-going-anywhere grin on her face, and he knows he’s about to be carpet-bombed with questions that a sour, bronchitic Earl would never trouble himself to ask.
‘And how are you doing today, Bonnie?’
‘Livin’ the dream,’ she says, wiping her hands on her sweatshirt. ‘Any fires this morning?’
‘Haven’t you heard? We’re a smoke-free environment up here.’
‘A good one up in Dawson, a couple little farts down in Haines Junction, and nothing for us. That just isn’t fair.’
‘It’s a bitch, it’s true.’
‘We don’t get something soon and your boys are going to be under my feet next year even more than usual, asking to put it all on their tab. And you know something? I won’t be able to do it. Those chuckleheads don’t blow a candle out before winter and it’ll leave you and Terry Gray as my only paying customers.’
‘We’ll get our fire.’
‘It’s not just me.’
‘I know all about—’
‘It’s like dominoes. You fellas lose your jobs
and we’ll all come falling after you.’
‘Don’t worry, Bonnie. You’ve heard of a rain dance? Well, I did a little fire dance for us this morning.’
‘You did?’
‘Oh yeah. Had smoke coming out my ass. You should’ve seen it.’
‘Maybe next time.’
Miles glances toward the open back door, down the hallway that leads to the motel outbuilding. If he made a run for it right now he may not have to answer a single awkward inquiry. But he’ll have to act quickly. Bonnie has placed her hands on her hips, elbows out. A gunslinger ready to fire.
‘Is Earl around?’ Miles asks instead of making a move, his boots stuck to the gummy floor.
‘Need their room number?’
‘You could at least make a
show
of minding your own business.’
‘Friends visiting?’ she asks, pretending not to have heard him.
‘They’re people I know.’
‘Now that’s a funny thing. When people I know come to town I have them stay at my place.’
One night. That’s all it takes. One night for not only Miles’s life to take a serious turn toward the complicated, but for every citizen of Ross River to have heard about it. He can see this in Bonnie’s bosom, of all things. Her breasts swelling high against the cotton in the pride of a job well done.
‘It’s a different situation from that,’ Miles says.
‘Different how?’
‘Listen—’
‘I like her. Just so you know. I like the
look
of the woman. Sensible. And tougher than you’d guess, seems to me.’
‘Is that your female intuition talking?’
‘Better. That’s my bartender’s intuition talking.’
Miles laughs a genuine laugh, and suspects that his lack of sleep has left him giddy and vulnerable. But to his astonishment, Bonnie decides to let him off the hook.
‘Go see Earl. You can talk to me about your fascinating life any old time.’
‘It’s not fascinating,’ Miles says. ‘But one of these days, I’ll tell you my whole boring story. You’ll just have to promise to keep it between you and me.’
‘I’ll make any promise you want. It’s keeping those promises that gives me trouble, that’s all.’
As he does every time he sees it, Miles wonders where the hell the stone fountain in front of the Welcome Inn came from. A pot-bellied cherub pissing in spurts, which makes Miles think of his own private struggles, the prematurely enlarged prostate that bedevils his nights. He’d love to know the story behind it. This half-ton piece of Renaissance kitsch that somebody took the pains to haul up here and that Earl, a man who seems not to care a whit about others’ comfort, plugs in every day that the temperature is above freezing.
For the thousandth time, Miles makes a mental note to ask Bonnie about it the next time he sees her, and knows even as he does so that he will forget, again, as soon as the statue is out of his sight.
He climbs the outside stairs to the second floor, walks to the end of the outbuilding where Earl told him he’d put Alex and Rachel. (’Nice and quiet out there,’ he’d said, but Miles knew it was the room directly above the kitchen, and even though quiet, would stink of whatever daily special was lobbed into the deep fryer.)
Miles studies the cracks in the door’s paint, waits for the whistle to leave his breath before knocking.
‘Momma,’ Rachel calls out when she opens the door, wearing the same strawberry dress. ‘Miles is here.’
‘Good morning,’ he says, speaking over the sound of Alex flushing the toilet somewhere within the gloom.
‘Where’s Stump?’
‘He likes to sleep in.’
‘He does?’
‘Oh yeah. He’s real big on the sleeping.’
‘Bet
I
could wake him up.’
‘Bet you could.’
Alex emerges from the room’s darkness to place her hands on Rachel’s shoulders.
‘Enjoying your stay?’ he asks her.
‘Aside from the gunk bubbling up the bathtub drain and the sheets that smell like chicken fingers, it’s five star all the way.’