The Wildfire Season. Andrew Pyper
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‘Have you set traps?’
‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live somewhere, right?’
‘That’s not ridiculous.’
‘Do you have mice?’
‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘In my van.’
‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’
‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’
In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.
She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.
‘What is that?’ she says.
‘What?’
‘That.’
Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.
‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.
‘A flat mouse.’
‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and phwat!’
‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.
Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.
When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.
Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’
Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.
Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.
That summer, they sublet the apartment and Miles drove out west for the same job he had worked the past four years, taking a position on a forest firefighting crew in the British Columbia Interior. Alex joined him for the ride as far as Vancouver and found work at an East End daycare. They saw each other as much as they could, Miles coming down to the city on his breaks and Alex taking the eight-hour bus ride to Salmon Arm on Saturdays to spend the night with him before taking the bus back on Sunday morning.
On the return cross-country drive, in a Robin’s Donuts parking lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw, Miles gave Alex a ring he’d won from his foreman in a poker game.
‘It’s collateral,’ he said.
‘You want a loan?’
‘I want your time.’
‘I don’t get it.’
Miles placed his hands against the sides of Alex’s head. She could feel them shaking.
‘Next summer is going to be my last one working the fires. And when I come back, I want to give you something with a real rock in it.’
‘Are you looking for an answer now?’
‘That’s up to you.’
Alex slipped the foreman’s ring on her finger, a silver band with the name ROY on it in raised fool’s gold. She turned it against her knuckle until the metal warmed her skin.
‘It’s not really my style. And it’s way too big,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep it anyway.’
They spoke frankly, always and right from the start, and best when of grave things, confessions, the conveying of bad news. For Miles, this involved the story of his missing father. A chemical engineer at the Nanaimo pulp mill who married Miles’s mother, bought a modest house near the harbour, and on the day before his son’s fifth birthday, left without leaving behind a note, an address, anything to suggest he was ever coming back.
Honesty was never an issue between them. They were truthful out of the need to be together, and plain talk came as naturally to them as desire itself. Before they knew it—and for the first time in their lives—they were speaking as man and wife.
Miles was accepted to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Alex took a position at the Arrowsmith School for learning disabled children in the same city. Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before the beginning of their new lives together, of true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season.
His name is Tim, but everyone calls him the kid. Every attack team Miles has ever worked on has had a ‘kid’, a nickname automatically assigned to the youngest member of the crew. But this one deserves it. He has the sort of face that is an indisputable foreshadowing of how he would look twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, and how even then, he would still be the kid. Round and shinychinned, his skin so flushed as to be an almost laughable display of good health. At first, Miles told himself to call the boy by his proper name, so that at least one of the crew saw that he was doing a man’s job and deserved to be recognized for it. But by the end of the second week even Miles couldn’t fight the obvious and called him nothing but ‘kid’ from then on.
The fire camp Miles has been assigned to is about twelve miles out of Salmon Arm, at the petered-out end of a logging road. When Miles arrives, he is taken into the camp office, where the fire director as well as a rep from the pulp company sit on the other side of the room’s single desk. Miles wonders what he could have already done that would justify being fired.
Instead, they make him foreman. The pay isn’t much better than a crewman’s, but the desk will be his, and use of the camp’s only phone, which will allow him to call Alex in the evenings and