The Wildfire Season Read online

  Laughter echoed up the street behind him. A bottle clanking over gravel. Wade turned to see Crookedhead James and Jerry McCormack walking home and couldn’t believe they hadn’t seen him.

  He slipped back into the darkness and felt it envelop him, the air cooling with every step. There was no moon. He would pass through the backyards of his neighbours, as unnoticed as a foraging coyote descended from the hills.

  On the way back, a shadow slipped out from behind a darkened trailer and stopped directly in his path. Of a size that Wade had a sense of its weight before he could trace its outline. A shape he only figured to be a dog after meeting its eyes. Uncollared, silent, watching him come but refusing to move aside. One of the half-dozen sled team leaders that had earned the privilege to walk free of its kennel over the summer months, waiting for the return of cold, of snow.

  The animal opens its mouth and the sight of its blue teeth brings him up short. It is only panting, or possibly smiling. But Wade interprets its ease in his presence as an affront, a challenge to his command of the night.

  Without looking around to check if anyone is watching, he once more raises the shotgun’s butt to his shoulder. The malamute stiffens its ears as though at a word it has heard before but can’t recall its meaning.

  Wade takes two steps forward and fires without stopping. Even the gun’s kick doesn’t slow him. He walks through the gap between the dog’s halved body before all but one, asleep or awake, recognizes the crack as the sound of murder.

  Chapter 9

  Not counting Mungo’s attempts to sell hot dogs off his backyard barbecue after softball games, there is only one restaurant in town. Given these limitations, Alex and Rachel are surprised the next morning to discover that eating out in Ross River is an international affair. The two of them stand outside the Lucky China Buffet & Tavern, Alex reading aloud the claims of the sign over the door. ‘Serving “China”, “Canadian” and “Whole World” Cuisine!”’ she says. ‘There’s got to be something in there we can eat.’

  ‘There’s room over here!’ Mungo calls to them as they walk through the door. Aside from his son, Tom, and a woman that Alex takes to be Mungo’s wife sitting across from them, he is the only customer.

  ‘Thanks,’ Alex says, ushering Rachel over to sit next to Tom and pulling out a chair for herself.

  ‘These are the worst parts of my dysfunctional family,’ Mungo says by way of introduction. ‘My wife, Jackie. My son, Tom. The only one missing is my girl, Pam, and she’s at the library, reading books. Heard of them, Tom? Those heavy things full of paper?’

  ‘Ha,’ Tom says, and threatens to catapult a french fry at his father with his fork.

  ‘Hello again,’ Mungo says, turning his attention to the girl.

  ‘This is Rachel.’

  ‘She looks like a Rachel. But then again, I’d have said she looks like a Bob if you’d told me that was her name.’

  Alex and Rachel look over the menu, but Mungo tells them, ‘Just ask for two specials. You’ll end up with what they’ve got too much of, no matter what you order.’

  Before the food comes, Tom and Rachel duck under the table to whisper stories to each other. Which leaves Jackie to ask where Alex has come from.

  ‘Toronto,’ she says, surprised by the apology that finds its way into the word. ‘The other side of the world.’

  ‘It’s all the same world.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘So what do you do on the other side of it?’

  ‘I teach. Kids. Special kids. I’m a teacher,’ Alex says foolishly, and considers saying more to wipe away the blank expression on Jackie’s face.

  ‘You’re a friend of Miles?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Miles keeps us in fires.’

  ‘You mean he fights them.’

  ‘She means he finds them,’ Mungo says.

  ‘He doesn’t make the fires,’ Alex says, with an irritation she hears but cannot contain.

  ‘We’re kind of superstitious around here, I guess,’ Mungo laughs. ‘We believe that, sometimes, people can make their own luck.’

  When the plates of scrambled eggs and bacon arrive, Alex lets Rachel eat her breakfast under the table with Tom. As she chews, Jackie tells Alex about the Ross River school, the computers in the library that had been delivered free from the manufacturer (’You know, so they could put a nice article in the corporate newsletter telling how they’d given some laptops to those glue-sniffing Eskimos’) but that the kids had never been instructed how to use.

  ‘Tom here can play video games where you blow the lungs out of Iraqis, and my husband has figured out how to look at porn from Sweden, but that’s about it,’ Jackie says, patting Alex’s free hand. ‘We’re prehistoric. We’re the goddamn Flintstones.’

  ‘Computers aren’t everything. What’s more important are people who want to get involved.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re running for mayor. Mungo, do we even have a mayor?’

  ‘I think we used to,’ Mungo says vaguely, sitting sideways with his head down, giggling along with Tom and Rachel under the table.

  ‘Either way, Alex here’s got my vote.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t need an outsider to tell you how to do things.’

  ‘Oh yeah, we can tie our own shoes. And you’re right, there’s smart people in this town. Committed people. All I’m saying is we can take all the help we can get. Or at least we should.’

  Jackie snorts to indicate a division of opinion on the issue.

  ‘You planning on sticking around awhile?’ Mungo asks, his head popping up from under the table.

  ‘Not if I can find someone to take a look at my truck’s transmission.’

  ‘You’re leaving right away?’

  ‘We only came to say hello.’

  ‘That’s a lot of mileage for one word.’

  ‘There’s nothing here, anyway.’

  ‘We’re here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I meant for us.’

  Mungo shakes his head, as though tossing a set of judgments from the front of his mind to somewhere in the back.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t eat in this place tonight,’ he says to Rachel, crouched down so that his nose waggles six inches above hers.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m going to bring you something.’

  ‘A present?’

  ‘Better,’ Mungo says, coming so close to the girl’s face it crosses his eyes. ‘Moose burgers!’

  Miles doesn’t use his phone much. He’s always found it strange to call people in Ross River, given that you could as easily stand on your front steps and shout your message into just about every living room in town. On this morning, however, he finds himself dialling the only number he knows by heart aside from his own.

  ‘Mr Bader?’ Margot’s voice. Tired, but ready for anything.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh. Morning, bruiser.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Not bad enough.’

  ‘I called to apologize.’

  ‘I heard he was cutting pretty close to the bone.’

  ‘You know Wade.’

  ‘Less and less.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘He’s been strange lately. Ever since—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’m just telling you. He’s so angry. Beyond angry, so that he’s in this weird trance a lot of the time. But you can tell there’s something bad going on in there.’

  ‘Is he hitting you?’

  ‘No more than usual. His heart isn’t in it. I’m starting to think that smacking me around is just a way to kill time before he…’

  ‘Before what?’

  There’s a pause so quiet that Miles wonders if they’ve been disconnected.

  ‘He scares me,’ she says finally. Tries to laugh, but clears her throat instead. ‘Looks like you’ve got your hands full yourself.’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  �
�You don’t say.’

  Miles can see her sitting at the kitchen table, her hair dripping from the shower, sipping at a jumbo mug of black coffee. She’ll let Wade remain dead to the world until the last minute. And she’ll let Miles hang on the end of the line until he comes up with something.

  ‘I knew Alex at a different time, when I was a different person,’ he starts. He thinks of five different ways of beginning five different sentences and abandons each of them in turn. ‘Rachel, her little girl—I don’t know her at all. They just showed up. And it’s no good, Margot. It’s no good.’

  ‘An instant family.’

  ‘They’re not my family.’

  ‘Then why’d they come all the way up here? To ruin your day?’

  ‘It’s a formality.’

  ‘A woman doesn’t spend that much time looking for a man for the sake of formalities.’

  ‘How do you—?’

  ‘I spoke with her.’

  ‘You what?’

  He can hear Margot take a sip, and the heat of the coffee passes down his throat as well as hers.

  ‘I bumped into the two of them.’

  ‘What’d she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing close to everything.’

  Miles stares down at his bare feet and thinks they look old. Bulging veins, gnarled toes, the smoothness given way to ugly bumps and ridges. If his feet look old, maybe he does, too. Perhaps that’s what Alex has come to tell him. He’s not what he used to be and it’s time he woke up to the fact. Just look at those feet.

  ‘I want you to do something for me,’ he says.

  ‘I won’t have time to make a steak delivery before I go.’

  ‘It’s not that. I want you to radio in now and then when you go out on this hunt.’

  ‘And tell you what?’

  ‘Where you are. That you’re okay. You can get me at the fire office or in the truck. Will you do that?’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ she says, doubt pulling at her words. ‘But I’ve got to tell you, you’re spooking me a bit.’

  In the background there’s a growling yawn, followed by bare feet thudding over linoleum. Miles wonders if Wade’s feet have grown as unsightly as his own.

  ‘I better go,’ Margot whispers, and he’s about to say something more, something about a dream he had where everything went wrong, but she’s already gone.

  Alex and Rachel walk through Ross River with Mungo as their guide. Alex looks about her at the dishevelled cabins and corroded trailers and, not for the first time, feels that anywhere has the potential of being home. At the same time, she knows that such transience exists only in theory. It’s the attachments that get in the way. Sometimes it is a place itself (she had friends at university who longed for their homes on the Newfoundland coast or solemn prairies with an intensity she had at first tried to dismiss as lyrical arrogance but in the end had envied). More often, it’s people. A single friendship could be enough. A lover. Family, in any one of its nuclear, alternative or haunted forms.

  Not that Miles could ever make a family out of Alex and Rachel. If anything, she believed that seeing him again was what had to be put behind her before she could begin to form a more permanent idea of family in her life, however that might be achieved. A new man. The contented resignation to single motherhood. Who knows? She had heard of farming communes made up of people like Rachel and herself, working together and sharing the food, the beds. Nothing would be ruled out in advance.

  For now, she walks through another town that is not her home. One so alien and radiating defeat it counts as one on a long list of those that never could be.

  But there is no question that it is Mungo’s. He keeps telling her that he wants to show them what this place is all about, but after a while, she figures that their walk has no specific destination. It’s the neighbours he wants them to meet. Tinkering under the hoods of trucks, playing tricycle smashup derby, hanging laundry on lines sagging between cedar branches. Some say hello, though most refuse to speak. All of them stare.

  That Mungo Capoose leads the parade makes it official. Government employed, a council member at the band office, second in command on the fire team. The sort of fellow you only respected more even as you laughed at him, his pincushion nose inflated with rye, his high-kneed walk. By the end of the hour Mungo has brought Alex and Rachel before half of Ross River’s population. Judging by the mostly blank looks that have received them, Alex would judge their campaign a failure. Yet Mungo seems pleased.

  ‘Not everyone is awake this early,’ he says, and Alex glances at her watch. Ten to noon.

  Mungo leads them back to the Welcome Inn. It’s the first time his face shows explicit curiosity.

  ‘It’s not my business, but I think I know Miles about as well as—’

  ‘You’re right. It’s not your business.’

  ‘I’m saying he’s broken, that’s all. And that’s a different thing from being bad.’

  ‘You want me to forgive him?’

  Mungo looks at her, and sees something that makes him take a step back from her into the street.

  ‘I was only—’

  ‘You can’t know the promises that someone’s broken just by looking at him. And you can’t ask someone to forgive what hasn’t been done to you.’

  Alex smiles, but it’s a mask. The girl comes running up to join them and she takes her by the hand.

  ‘Thanks for the tour,’ Alex says, and starts back the way they came.

  Chapter 10

  A day and a half later, Miles is in his truck, alone, heading out of town. His head emptied of all thoughts but one.

  By the time he gets back, Alex and the girl will be gone.

  He’d decided this was the best way to handle things only the night before, lying awake in his bed, trying not to think about the events of the preceding morning and afternoon. Even now, the day before only comes to him in painful snatches. His climb up Eagle’s Nest Bluff with Alex and Rachel. The osprey flying over the river below. The handful of words he exchanged with the girl at the cliff’s top that he’s still trying to unscramble. Later. He’d get around to their strange hours on Eagle’s Nest Bluff later, to sorting out the riddle of what he asked and what she answered over the interminable revisitations that were fated to be the rest of his life. He’s just glad that, this time, he has a halfway believable excuse to make his escape.

  As part of his duties as supervisor, Miles has to check on the handful of fire watchtowers in the region at least once each month. Two of them haven’t seen him since June. A tour that should take him about three days. More than long enough to ensure that when he returns, nobody will be waiting for him.

  He tries to credit himself for at least giving Alex a call before he left. But even that hadn’t gone as he’d planned. When she answered, the idea of a no-harm-done goodbye strikes him as ridiculous, and in an instant he thinks of something else. As it passes his lips, he wonders whether he intended to say it in the first place.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he says. ‘I’m going to be checking on some towers for the next couple of nights and, seeing what Earl is gouging you for, I thought you might want to stay here while I’m gone.’

  ‘Where will you leave the keys?’ she answers without hesitation.

  Miles knew they would go, had wanted them to go, yet had somehow counted on seeing the girl one more time before they did. Not that he has anything to say to her. He just assumed he would be given the chance to take a snapshot of her before she left. One he would conjure not with a lens but in his head. An everchanging version that would age as he aged, so that she might be called upon if needed, far down the line.

  ‘I’m terrible at this,’ he says with an idiotic chuckle.

  ‘I don’t know of anybody who’s good at it.’

  ‘Well, then. I guess I want to thank you for bringing her here.’

  ‘Say her name.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s like Tim. And your dad, Edward. Not saying their names doesn�
�t make them go away.’

  He could argue with this, or simply hang up, because he’s not sure that she’s right, and even if she is, this kind of dissection is the last thing he needs. On any other of the preceding thousand mornings of his life, such prying would instantly push him into rage, and he waits for it, eyes closed.

  ‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘Thank you for bringing Rachel.’

  They may mumble a farewell after this, they may not. He doesn’t remember anything more, in any case. Miles hears the click at the end of the line and the world goes black, like standing in a windowless room when the bulb burns out. He’s not afraid. It’s a matter of getting used to it. You just stay where you are in the dark for a while until you can almost see again.

  Is there a polite way to tell someone to shut the fuck up? This has been the primary question Margot has found herself mulling over on the forty-five-minute drive out of town and down the seldom used Lapie Canyon Road, listening to Elsie Bader chirp on about, well, about what? Sweet bugger all. A shower of touristy inquiries and exclamations at ‘all the nature’ around them that are so empty of significance Margot can only guess the old woman has carefully intended to speak without saying a single thing.

  Margot checks the rear-view mirror every few minutes, expecting Mr Bader to take things in hand and stuff his bug shirt in his wife’s mouth, but he only pretends to sleep, his forehead leaving grease stains on the window. He’s used to this, apparently. And Wade, Margot knows, is so painkilled that, for the moment, he is able to endure even this fresh hell.

  Mungo’s son is back there, too, having been brought along at the last minute. She waved Tom over to her truck as she’d passed him and Mungo giving Alex and Rachel a tour of the town and asked him if he’d like to make a couple hundred bucks. The kid had joined her in the bush from time to time in the past. He was capable and, most important as far as Margot is concerned, learned by example instead of asking dumb questions. Just the sort of help she could use carrying the packs on a job like this. Tom is alone in appearing amused by Mrs Bader’s running commentary. He keeps a sideways grin on his face at any rate, though true to form, offers no words of his own.