The Wildfire Season. Andrew Pyper
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he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’
‘Your own postcards?’
‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’
‘You make your own postcards?’
Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.
‘The winters are long,’ he says.
Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside from rolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.
‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.
‘Why?’
‘Just come here.’
Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.
Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.
‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.
‘One with a shower would be nice.’
‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’
‘And tell her Miles sent us?’
‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’
For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.
‘You have to go now,’ he says.
The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takes Rachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.
Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place—these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.
It took less than an hour’s walk through this weedy, broken-hearted nowhere to forget most of what she expected he would have become. All she’s certain of is that he’s in worse shape than even her most malicious scenarios. It’s what allowed his talk of postcards and the sight of his big-eared dog to make a momentary dent. But even as she feels a brush of pity come and go, what remains is her desire to spray kerosene over the half of him the fire missed, toss a match his way, and watch. Not only for the pain it would cause, but to leave a tattoo that would forever mark his cowardice, his uncorrectable failure to the world. She has thought about this for longer and in greater detail than she would ever admit.
Alex is strangely glad to find that she still hates him. As much now that she’s found him as she had the evening she’d come home to their empty apartment and looked for the note he hadn’t bothered to leave. She’s grateful that the sight of him has done nothing to alter her fundamental judgments. Her planned retributions.
What she hadn’t seen coming is how much he frightens her. One of the things she hadn’t told him about her past four summers was that a couple of the people she’d shown his photo to had recognized him, or at least had a story to tell. A mechanic in Dease Lake said the scars made him sound like a guy ‘way far up,’ one that had nearly killed a man for looking at him and asking if Halloween had come early this year. A hardware store clerk in Telegraph Creek claimed to have heard about someone with burns down one side of his face ‘like a line of shade’ who hunted solo, living on grizzly meat and firing his shotgun at anyone who came within a half mile of his camp. Alex didn’t believe these stories, nor did she dismiss them. She simply added them to the composite portrait she was assembling in her mind. One that took hideous shape as she added a murderous grin, jellied eyes, blood-soaked teeth.
The first summer had been something of an accident. A weekend drive out of the city after the end of term. She spent her first night in a creepy motel near the marina in Parry Sound, and found herself enjoying the creepiness, the foolish thrill of being a young mother on the lam. In the morning, instead of heading back, she turned north, then west. At lunch, she bought a half-dozen identical postcards showing a row of oiled men’s torsos frying on a beach and sent them to the people who might be wondering where she’d gotten to. ‘I’m taking our show on the road,’ she wrote. ‘We’ll be gone for as long as the credit card and Pampers hold out. Please don’t worry.’ She signed each of them ‘Love, Alex and Rachel (a.k.a. Thelma and Louise).’
She bought a tent and sleeping bag in Dryden, a camp stove in Medicine Hat, matching toques for her and Rachel in Jasper. Even as far as Fort St John she still wasn’t looking for Miles in any concerted way. And yet, more and more, Alex found herself glancing through the windows of roadhouses, waiting for heads to turn her way in convenience store lineups, judging each town she passed through on its merits as a hiding place.
The next year, once school was out, Alex had plans to spoil herself for a change, a splurging on cheap good-for-you treats. She would catch up on the prize-winning novels she’d seen praised in the paper for their ‘affirming’ and ‘meditative’ qualities, start jogging again, plant tomatoes in her building’s communal garden. To steal a few hours of freedom during the week, she enrolled Rachel in a daycare downtown. The girl’s resistance, however, became apparent almost immediately. The daycare workers called with reports of her clawing at the fence around the Astroturfed playground. When asked to come inside with the other kids, she would only stare up between the surrounding buildings at the postage stamp of blue above.
The daycare people suggested it was homesickness, but Alex recognized the real cause of the girl’s protest. After the long, indoors winter, Rachel had taken Toronto’s warm sun as a broken promise. In the stifling evenings of their apartment, she would uncharacteristically cry, refuse favourite foods, fuss before being put down to sleep. She wanted out.
In the middle of June, overheated and underslept herself, Alex rented a car and took Rachel up to Algonquin. The idea was for the girl to sleep on the drive and be rewarded with a swim in one of the park’s thousand green lakes. As soon as the hazy suburbs’ brew-yer-owns, discount warehouses and twenty-four-screen multiplexes shaped like UFOs had given way to regrowth forests and grazing fields, the girl was quiet. Not asleep, but tranquilized, her fingers splayed against the car’s window like an antenna receiving signals that had been unreadably scrambled in the city. Once at the park, Rachel’s mood was wholly transformed. Alex hadn’t realized how much she missed seeing her child smile, and how long she had gone without.
When they returned to the apartment two days later, it was only to buy a used truck, pick up the tent and camping gear and leave messages with family and friends. They were heading west again. Looking back on it now, Alex sees the last thing she brought along as almost an afterthought. A photo of Miles she’d slipped in an envelope and stuck in the glove compartment.
She’d done it for Rachel. She’d done