good at that,’ Alex says.
‘Good at what?’
‘Figuring out strangers in a hurry.’
‘It’s a hell of a skill to have.’
‘When you’re on the road with just your mom around to keep an eye on you, it’s a good thing to know who might be bad news.’
‘What do you mean, on the road?’
Alex takes a step forward so that she can look directly up into Miles’s face. Her lips white, bloodless. He’s certain she is about to throw her fist into his face and he spreads his feet apart to keep his balance when it comes.
‘Four summers in a row,’ she says instead. ‘Looking for you.’
Miles turns away. Over Alex’s shoulder, he watches Mungo give Rachel a courtly bow, before taking Tom and his friend by the collars and pulling them off with him, squeezing the boys against his sides as they make a show of trying to escape his grip.
‘I can walk you by where I live. I have a dog. His name is Stump,’ Miles offers in a rush.
‘Rachel?’ The girl runs up behind Alex, grinning. But when she looks at Miles, her face is instantly emptied of expression. ‘Would you like to meet a dog named Stump?’
‘Stump?’ She swallows, as though tasting the name. ‘Grumpy lump! Let’s see Stump!’
Miles leads them past the prefab utility shed that once housed the radio station but now stands locked, the hastily painted CHRV-FM 88.9 sign over the door peeling away in rolls, the transmitting antenna bent to the side from kids using the shed as an observation tower.
‘Can we hear it? On the radio in the truck?’ Rachel asks him. No longer rushing ahead, the girl now lingers twenty feet behind Miles and Alex, kicking at stones that nip the backs of their ankles.
‘They’ve closed it down.’
‘But when it did work, who talked on it?’
‘Anybody that wanted to.’
‘So if it worked now, could I go on and talk?’
‘There wouldn’t be anybody to stop you.’
Now that he thinks of it, Miles misses tuning in during his first year here, finding only static most of the time, but also unexpected treats. Bonnie reading from her grandmother’s recipe box. Mungo playing the same side of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire LP three times in a row. A bunch of preschoolers giggling for a half-hour straight. All of it reaching no farther than a two-mile radius of wilderness and perhaps a half-dozen others who may have been listening. There was a comfort in it, though. Sitting alone and having voices come to him. Confirming for whoever might be doing the talking or listening that they were here, together, even if what was being said and heard made no trace of difference in the world.
As they walk toward his cabin, Miles and Alex ask questions of each other for the girl’s sake—Had Alex taken Rachel to see the dancing Gertie Girls in Dawson? Does Miles get a chance to go south in the winters?—but most of what passes between them comes in versions of the unsaid. No matter what caution they bring to their words, everything delivers both of them to the life they had discovered together, no greater in length than the time they have now been apart. They remember in the silence of shared understanding, two listeners tuned to the same voice. One that tells a story they already know but that surprises them anyway, leading them from what they had to what they lost, to Miles running away, to fire.
An afternoon rain has forced it underground. It hides beneath the surface, gnawing along roots far enough down to be untouched by moisture. The fire can find any number of hosts without ever showing itself to the world, living in oil shales, petroleum seeps or coal veins for weeks, even years. For now, tiny and unnamed, it allows itself to sleep.
A stethoscope placed on the ground would hear nothing, but a cheek could feel its warmth. In land like this, there may be a hundred such lazy fires for every square mile, more on the edges of swamps and bogs, where the fuels are rich but lie deeper. Most never awaken. They come to the end of whatever nourishes them and slowly suffocate, without a struggle, their hearts weak from birth. But this one is different. It was born with intent.
There. A white puff tails up from below, as though exhaled from an underworld cigarette. Another. Soon the smoke becomes a steady stream, broadening, clinging to the deadfall like morning fog.
Before it is extinguished, it will claim a land area greater than most national parks, leaving a lake of ash behind. It will turn bones to swan feathers. It will kill, and hide the bodies better than the most calculating assassin.
It will do all of this as though motivated by some idea of itself, by ambition, by hate. But as with all fires, it will have no desire but to live.
Why Miles?
Alex has wondered this perhaps more than anything else. Why had she decided to shed all her shyness for that one sun-glowy, blue-eyed boy over all the others? Why him, sitting alone on the back fire escape of a Montreal walk-up at the first party of the new term, the weeks ahead of her fizzing with possibility, never mind the next year, the next five?
Sometimes she’s sure it was his mouth that made her step out onto the fire escape on her own. Her housemate, Jen, a boy-crazy psych major from Massachusetts who liked to regard Alex as ‘so Canadian’ (which meant, for her, an innocent who didn’t stand a chance in the corrupt negotiations of sex), had asked where she was going when Alex had left her chatting up a pair of sniggering frat boys in the bathroom lineup, and Alex had told her, ‘I’m sure you can handle Beavis and Butthead on your own,’ and walked out into the cool night. It was his mouth that did it, she’s almost certain. His lips fine but deeply coloured, a mark of delicate youth on a face she would have otherwise thought of as broad featured, even rough. She saw him through the kitchen window, noticed his mouth and wanted to kiss it, as she had wanted before, daydreamingly, of others’. What was remarkable about this boy’s lips was that she wanted to kiss them first and then divide them with her tongue, slitting them apart as a blade opens an envelope, so that she could see what shape they’d make around his words.
‘Have you ever tried to eat the stars?’
Alex is literally taken off balance. It’s the heels she borrowed from Jen’s endless collection jamming through the metal slats as much as his question.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough.’
‘When I was a kid I would pick them right out of the sky. They had a taste, too.’
‘Were they good?’
‘Oh yeah. Too good. My mom told me if I ate too many I’d start to shine.’
Only now does Miles look at her directly, and Alex thinks that it’s too late. This boy has already had more than his fill of stars.
Miles pulls a clear plastic sandwich bag out of his pocket and shakes it in the air. Inside, a cluster of withered caps and stems leap over each other as though in an effort to escape.
