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
