The Wildfire Season. Andrew Pyper
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does.
Alex sees a ghoul. For the first time, she recognizes Miles’s scars for what they are. She sees their permanence, the wish she has that they weren’t there, the memory of what he looked like when they weren’t. It makes her gasp.
‘You see? You see?’ Miles is shouting at her, and she cannot reply because he’s too close, too loud. And because the answer is yes. She sees.
She tells him of her doctor’s visit in a note she leaves on the pillow next to him as he sleeps. It isn’t long. Half a page of news listed in punchy headlines.
It’s yours.
I’m going to keep it.
I still love you.
We’ll talk tonight.
Much later, she wondered how long after waking it took for him to decide.
He packs in the morning when Alex is away at work. He can’t face the rest of the apartment, so he starts with the bedroom essentials, stuffing a duffle bag with jeans, wool socks, half a dozen bedside-table paperbacks. Then he floats through the other rooms, holding framed photos of themselves to his eyes—kissing in the bleachers at a McGill vs. Queen’s football game, dressed up and drunk at a friend’s wedding—before putting them down again. He rattles through the piles of CDs but can’t remember who bought which one for whom, and discovers he doesn’t want to listen to any of it again anyway. They have collected so much meaningful garbage together that simply looking at it now makes him feel heavy, his veins pumping mercury.
He means to leave Alex a letter. In his mind he imagines an impossible document, at once less and more than an explanation or an apology or a cataloguing of his thousand unmanageable torments. Something along the lines of a thank-you note, or perhaps the obligatory sentence in an author’s acknowledgements page expressing gratitude for all the help he has received but accepting all errors as his own. He even begins a draft, but it doesn’t survive the first reading. No matter how much he keeps out of it, the words can’t help referring to the kid, the gluttonous melodrama of his own selfpity. His second attempt is yet more minimalist, but ends up saying the same things with even greater force.
Miles can see the cruelty in leaving no trace of himself behind for her. It would seem intentional to Alex, one last, silent rejection, but he decides he has no choice. In the end he does nothing more than slide his keys under the door after pulling it shut.
Miles has a dog with bad dreams. When he’s home during the day he can hear Stump’s sleep-muffled barks from the end of the bed the two of them share, the three-alarm woo-woo-woomph! associated with visitor warnings. Then something turns for the worse, and the terror that the dog faces brings out unfamiliar barks of distress, each distinct from the rest, as though he refuses to believe this could actually be happening to him, a good boy whose only fault is lifting himself to table edges to clean the plates once the diners have left the room.
Their arrival saves him from one such nightmare—in-progress. Without even the faintest pause, the dog pads across the brown shag of the living room and begins licking Rachel’s face.
‘This is Stump?" Rachel asks, the dog lapping at her laughter.
‘That’s him.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why Stump?’
Miles has to think about this. It wasn’t because any part of the dog was missing. Instead, his name came from the way that, when Miles first spotted him from the side of the road, an abandoned pup sitting on his haunches in a clearcut of forest a few miles outside Teslin, he was nearly the same size and stood with the same square, unmovable silhouette as the levelled stumps of lodgepole pine and tamarack.
‘Stump!’ Miles had called to him when he pulled over in his truck, and the dog had understood that this was his new name and came trotting over to have his side thumped.
‘You’re a Stump,’ his master said again, simply, as though Miles had finally discovered another living thing that was as much a Stump as he was.
‘Because that’s his name,’ is all Miles tells Rachel now.
Miles thinks of Stump as the Mr Potato Head of dogs, his disproportionate features assembled with apparent malice, or perhaps humour. His nose as long as a ratter’s (though he fears holes of any kind, and requires some coaxing to warm Miles under the bedsheets on hungover mornings). Oversized ears that stand rigid atop his head in a kind of victory salute. Eyes as dark and bulbous as chocolate chips. For all of these handicaps, Stump made friends easily, a talent due in no small part to his indiscriminate distribution of kisses, the pink waterslide of his tongue reaching out for the faces of all who know his name, scratch his silver goatee or simply bend within range. He is so generous with these compensations that some call him ‘handsome dog,’ although it is clear that handsomeness is about five crossbreedings removed from his present appearance. Still, he’s not without his prejudices. He has never liked Wade Fuerst, for example. This for obvious reasons, even to a mongrel simpleton like Stump.
‘Comfy,’ Alex says, running her fingers over the varnished log end tables and peering up at the oil painting of a wolf howling at a too-yellow moon over the wood stove.
‘I don’t need much,’ Miles says.
He leaves the door open behind him, but the air inside the cabin remains laden with a combination of uncirculated scents: the gamy moose steaks that Miles has been thawing and eating for his dinner four nights out of seven ever since Margot started dropping them off, the mildew of the hall bathroom that no amount of ammonia scrubbings could entirely get rid of. Now, with Rachel and Alex in the room with him, Miles smells the cabin as a visitor would, and he’s embarrassed by what it says about his life. The bachelor’s neglect. The sockfarty aura that likely follows wherever he goes.
Alex circles the room, stopping to pull back the curtains and looking out at the picnic table with beer bottles sprouting up around its legs like mushrooms, and beyond it, the wall of forest that borders the backyard and marks the end of Ross River itself. She puts her cheek against the glass and looks both ways, but the cabin is far enough from the rest of town that no neighbours are visible. Even here, Alex thinks, Miles has chosen to live on the outside of things.
‘Momma! He’s following me!’ Rachel shrieks, walking backwards down the hall with Stump wagging after her.
‘He sure is,’ Alex says, pulling away from the window to study the dining-room table next to it. A plate smeared with egg yolk, three half-filled coffee mugs, and at the opposite end, a chess board with a game laid out over its squares.
‘Who are you playing?’ she asks, picking up the white queen by her crown.
‘My mother.’
‘She lives here?’
‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’
‘You don’t visit?’
Alex places the queen down on the board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.
‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’
Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.
‘How do you play?’ she says.
‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it, and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’
‘If