It started here.
He snaps the campfire sticks he picked up at the outfitter’s in Carmacks into cubes and drops them randomly, one at a time, as he paces. Will two sticks be enough? He decides three would be better, just to be sure. Then four. He takes the tin of kerosene from his pack and sprays it in spidery lines reaching out from the duff he has raked into a small pile with his hands. He thinks he may have overdone it a bit but reminds himself that whatever evidence he leaves behind will be turned to ash long before he makes it back to town.
The firestarter plucks the Zippo from his breast pocket. He pauses long enough to stroke his thumb over the illustration etched into its silver plate. A habit. One that is observed every time he holds the lighter in his palm before lifting the same thumb to turn the flint. Over the years, both in his own possession and those of its previous, anonymous owners, the drawing’s lines have been smoothed, the words printed beneath it faded, though still readable. New York City. Atop this caption, the Manhattan skyline is rendered from a thousand feet above the island’s south tip, so that the Chrysler Building is a pope’s hat in the distance and, looming in the foreground, the twin towers stand guarding all that lies behind them.
They were gone now, of course. He can’t believe it was nearly four years ago that he watched them collapse into aprons of dust on TV, then wonders what isn’t right about four years, whether it feels longer ago or more recent than that. Not that he’d ever seen them when they were still around. He’d never been to New York in his life. The distance between there and where he is now strikes him as preposterous, science-fictional.
Where had he gotten the Zippo, anyway? A gift, he thinks, or maybe not. He’s not sure who gave it to him if it is. It’s just one of those massproduced souvenirs that make their way around the world, a cousin in the family of Maid of the Mist pens and Mao alarm clocks, drifting from hand to hand, the original sentiment attached to its purchase long rubbed away.
The firestarter is ready now. All he needs to do is flick the lighter and touch the flame to the accelerants spilled around his boots. Yet, for another moment, he does nothing but study the words and grooves of the Zippo’s face with a pointless intensity. What does he want these familiar hieroglyphs to reveal? Now, after so long spent in his pockets, lying on dresser tops, lost and found in the chasms between sofa pillows?
He’s only waiting for the answer to why he has come here to return. Already, he’s learned that this is the problem with being two people at once. The motivations of one tend to slip away for stretches so that, acting as the other, he finds himself having thoughts he doesn’t know the beginning or end of.
Still, even the intentions of a stranger standing in the woods with a lighter in his hand aren’t difficult to guess.
With one more pass of his thumb over the lines of Manhattan, he starts a fire.
Then he bends to his knees, cups his hands on the ground, and starts another.
Sometimes, Miles McEwan can tell a thing is about to happen before it does. A jar of pickles envisioned falling out of the fridge before the door is opened, and then, in the next instant, he is on his knees, plucking baby dills from the brine on the floor. A phone that rings on the bedside table only after he reaches for the receiver. Eyes shut against lightning a full moment before the flash.
Right now, for instance, he looks at the door across the room and knows it is about to open. When it does, a woman who is barely a memory and a girl he has never seen before will enter. The light behind them will roll out from between their feet to make a carpet of gold over the concrete. Until they step inside, their faces will be too shadowed to reveal any details, but their silhouettes will show that the little girl holds on to the woman’s hand, their two arms linked as a single causeway between the shapes of their bodies.
That’s as far as his premonition goes. No words, no motion, no gesture showing the way into the what-happens-next. He is aware that such a vision wouldn’t be in the least remarkable if it took place in any other barroom, restaurant or community hall, whatever the Welcome Inn Lounge is the closest to being. But here, it is a rare occurrence for anyone to appear in doorways who Miles doesn’t already know. A place cast so far from the rest of the world that it has no strangers.
Ross River. Better known to those few who have ever heard of it as Lost Liver, on account of the heroic, if mostly cheerless, drinking that goes on. A scattering of storage sheds and slumping log cabins three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, a dot absent from all but the most scrupulous maps. Miles knows where he is. But up here, when he throws his head back to take in the night sky, he feels closer to the dimmest stars than the ground beneath his feet.
He pushes his gaze through the whirring blades of an exhaust fan that does its best to pump out the smoke, the yeasty splatterings, the pine-scented deodorant pucks that only half mask the reek of backed-up sewage. Quarter to eleven and still light outside. He squints to see as far as he can. Over the rusting tin roofs of the road-maintenance building and the padlocked radio station, past the yearning faces of TV satellite dishes atop the long-immobilized mobile homes, to the huddled green domes of the St Cyr range that cuts all of them off from the rest of the Territory, the country, the continent.
A woman and child are about to open the door across the room. What troubles him is that he’s more certain of an event that has yet to occur than the past that has brought him here.
‘Miles?’
As the Welcome Inn’s bartender, concierge and night cook, it is Bonnie’s job to stick her hand into the beer fridge, toss keys to any guests who might be staying in one of the lopsided rooms out back, and slam the microwave door shut behind frozen mini-pizzas. As a rule, Miles never sits with others at one of the tables. It leaves him alone to watch Bonnie slide her elbows toward him, her face hovering close enough for him to glimpse the remaining caramel-coated molars in her smiling mouth and take in a whiff of the photo-developing fluid that is in fact the conditioner she uses to prolong the life of her perm. He nods and absently lifts his hand to trace the scars down the right side of his face. Furious striations broad and deep enough to fit whole fingertips into.
‘Thanks,’ Miles says, and feels Bonnie clink another bottle against the two others in front of him. She maintains the habit of not collecting empties until closing time so that, as the night goes on, the patrons display scorecards on their tables.
Miles looks around and does a quick tally on who’s winning so far this evening. Mungo Capoose. Sharing a table with the younger guys, Jerry McCormack and Crookedhead James. Along with Miles, they constitute four-fifths of the Ross River forest firefighting crew. Mungo, Jerry and Crookedhead, along with the absent King, are his ‘attack team’, though by the look of them, all they’re fit to attack is a tray of tequila shots followed by the pillows in their beds.
‘Where’s King?’ Miles asks Mungo. The old man who is not as old as he looks lifts his head slowly, as though pulling his attention away from an intriguing calculation involving the slivers in the plywood next to his hands.
‘Working the radio.’
‘Do me a favour? Go check on him when you’re done that beer.’
‘You sending me out on a wake-up call?’
‘I wouldn’t trust anybody else.’
Miles would check on King himself except, the truth is, he’s not crazy about being alone around the
