Hinged
by Sid Sibo
Art by Julian Leung
Head down, eyes on her sap-spotted leather boots, Calla Cannon surfaced out of a timbered north-facing slope. The sudden leveling at the mountain’s saddle offered pause, and she sucked draughts of cool piney air. Faded smiley-face boot laces mocked her. She let her gaze drop along the sagebrush-freckled south slope, vaguely smudged by dawn’s re-awakening smoke. They’d hiked from Idaho into Wyoming in less than an hour.
“Jesus, Calla,” Jedidiah Turner huffed onto the saddle beside her, “we’re on days off, remember? What’s the hurry?”
She just pointed at the lush valley far below. “Used to call that Squirrel Meadows—when it was still part of the national forest. Back before the exchange with the ski resort. Now it’s Moose Run Manors.”
She heard a flippant, once-familiar voice in her head. Run away, run away—all good moose, run away now! Sweat fogged her eyes. She dragged off her hardhat, let it drop from her hand onto the ground. Her forehead dried in seconds.
They had seen the valley from the helicopter days ago as they flew out to work more backcountry portions of the three-fire complex. They’d been assigned here for over a week then, but it was the crew boss’s first look at the ‘urban’ edge. Otis whistled. “Check out the McMansions!” Calla was unimpressed. Last year, she chased a fire away from similar castles, on the other side of the same range. Neither Jed nor Otis were on the crew then.
Jed rubbed his eyes. “When did they all leave?”
“Two days ago. Evacuation orders apply to everyone down there, no matter their name.” And fire-duty law-dogs were stopping anyone else from driving in.
“Only one road access?”
She nodded, pointing at the narrow valley outlet. “If our helitac crew goes in, we’ll need that single road to walk out.”
“Not safe then. We shouldn’t have to worry about them sending us.”
Despite his words, Calla heard doubt. Precisely why they were here now. She inhaled energy from August blooms of native paintbrush, candy apple red, shining here on the high ridge. At nine-thousand feet, the early-season Jacob’s Ladder bloomed only as early as the snow melted. She let its cerulean bells calm her guts. She touched yellow stamens, a shade matching her fire-retardant Nomex shirt, and her fingertip carried some pollen to her lips. So lonely, her lips had been. The crew did, in fact, need to worry.
Julian Leung, “Yellowstone on film”, photograph
“Can you see your place from here?” Jed oriented himself to the south.
Her breath had not settled yet, and she just shook her head. Being dispatched to a fire only forty crow-miles from home was both curse and comfort. Knowing the traits of native vegetation could help a person make educated guesses about fire behavior. Knowing the stories of local firefighter fatalities, however, could cause a lack of clear-sightedness. “Can’t see last year’s fire either, and it’s less than twenty miles, as the goose goes.” She pointed at the higher peaks between them and those swanky estates on the east. Calla shifted her fire pack, rolling her shoulders and neck under its familiar heft.
She leaned her Pulaski (axe-hoe, youth crews called it, grubbing trail) against a whitebark pine. She freed her hands of their leather gloves. Forget the government-issue suede with thick, blistering seams; she bought her own gloves, tan and supple kidskin. With a practiced flick, she shook each glove loose of twig and leaf shrapnel. She balanced them in the accommodating angle where her tool’s smooth hickory handle met coarse pine bark. Her teeth gnawed a hangnail.
Jed drank like a desert antelope. Water from the bladder-bag in her pack soothed Calla’s throat, scratchy from the summer’s abundance of sooty air. Greedy for the wet dribble, she bit harder on the tube’s rubber valve. She glanced over the sticker on her fallen hardhat: The Door to Safety Hinges on Common Sense. Purple permanent marker outlined the word ‘common.’ An embellishment George contributed one night while enjoying their government-issue MRE’s.
Meals Ready to Erf. Calla’s lips curved upward. Mountain chickadees visited in the whispering branches around her, and in the distance a Steller’s jay barked out orders no one heeded. Her lungs still burned, and it ticked her off. She certainly wasn’t out of shape, or unaccustomed to the elevation. Just tired.
“Jed.” She studied him, his sandy hair so much lighter than George’s bright mango, his lankiness. George always claimed a body type category of brick shithouse. Calla smiled, but it didn’t relieve her nerves. “One shouldn’t make big decisions when tired.”
“Or thirsty, or hungry.” Jed repeated their training lines. Grinned.
Yaddayaddayadda. Calla startled at hearing George’s typical tease. “Or angry,” she added, aching.
But they hadn’t snuck out of fire camp in the dark to turn around now. Jed pushed. “You know the Powers That Be won’t leave these spreads in the path of the fire.”
“A backfire could keep crews safer, if necessary.” Her voice held little strength.
“On the other hand, if no houses were here….” Jed touched the fusee pocket at his hip.
She turned away. “The universe is giving us a pretty clear signal.” They both recognized it. But it would take guts.
Air—she needed more air. She spread her arms out shoulder-high, parallel to the ridgeline, opening her lungs to the high country breeze. She felt the mountain below the calloused balls of her feet. The air flowing into her extended into a yawn, and she shook it off. She tipped her head back, eyes half-open to cloudless sky. In the pause of her stretch came a startling quiver—the thrum of embracing, heart expanding with her lungs. Bones shivered under her muscles, sharing an exuberance of connection. A holding-and-being-held confusion of oneness. Air whooshed back out her lips.
You’d forgotten how good life can be?
Eleven months and twenty-nine days ago, with George, she last felt electricity like this. The thrumming shock. Her lips, already dry as the duff underfoot, twitched in once-familiar elation.
Calla’s eyes flew open. She looked at Jed, who was re-tying his boots.
The sun’s first rays bested the Teewinot peaks in front of her. Disconcerted and dazed, she pointed westward. “Say G’Mornin’ to the crew.” They were just starting their two-day required rest period before their assignment extension.
Jed saluted their sleeping-in. “Slackers,” he said, and the words floated toward them on the last of the night’s downslope air current.
Julian Leung, “Yellowstone on film”, photograph
She slid her gloves into place, rubbing the back of a leathered hand across her cheeks. She dug her heels into loose dirt as they headed toward the verdant bottoms. Underground water began half-way down, giving rise to pale aspens and royal blue delphinium, smelling like cayenne and tall as she was, up to the withers of a small mountain horse. In a low spot where hard clay marbles skidded under her tread, she slipped.
“You all right?” Jed caught her uphill arm, the Pulaski a balancing rod in her downhill hand.
“Might be more tired than I thought.” She re-aligned her fusee pocket, straightening it to parallel her belt, and continued hiking down. Over their blunt foot fall beat, back-burn training echoed: Six fusee sticks per pocket, 1400 degrees, lasting ten minutes each. Whether to light them, where to light them. Double-check your rationale. She started laughing so hard she had to quit moving, hands on her knees. “Are you all right?”
Jed caught her giddiness. “Might be more thirsty than I thought.” He barked out a laugh and pointed at the closest house. “Let’s go.”
The McMansions grew larger. Calla felt herself shrinking, with less of the mountain holding her up. From her radio, the morning fire forecast began to rattle across the airwaves. Nothing much changed over the past fourteen days, and they didn’t expect anything different today. Like a gerbil, Jed sipped from his water tube while they listened, and as usual, the report ended with a Red Flag Warning. Today’s dry lightning was expected between 1130 and 1430.
“A little early.” Jed cocked one eyebrow. While she adjusted the radio farther back on her hip, he clipped his water tube into its keeper. “Remember when forest firefighting meant ‘Save the Timber Harvest’?” Their speed picked up again.
“Extinguishing every blaze before 10:00 a.m.—or calling in more hands to help get it done.” Calla snorted. “No matter what Smokey Bear says, fire ain’t all bad.” George loved sleuthing out the unsuspected roles fire plays in different landscapes.
Georgina-Lena, Fo-fina, loved to play Private Eye, but when she became Curious George, she did NOT turn into a guy. Calla made that one up herself, that first night when George sleuthed out which tent to find her in. She confessed her mother had once called her Gina, but it didn’t last.
Jed pointed beyond irrigated bottomland to the slopes climbing behind the bulked-up houses. “Look at all the dead pines, half-fallen-over. Perfect ladder fuels into the canopy.”
“Oh, yeah.” Calla’s voice was dull, not even sarcastic. “Firefighting success breeds only more fuel, more fire. Which at first pleased firefighters more than a little.”
“Why wouldn’t it? Sixteen-hour days, fourteen-day shifts, overtime, hazard pay, meals and sleeping arrangements—thin bags on rocky ground but too pooped to beg for better—all paid for.”
Spoken like George’s little brother, for sure. She snapped off a black coneflower head and beaned it between his shoulder blades. “You’ll have enough earnings in a four-month season to play all winter, or if you’re saving up, maybe substitute teaching. Got a plan yet?”
Jed, not burdened by hand tools, lifted both arms in parody of a snowboarder and jumped down a steep section of trail, changing direction every jump. The shake’n’bake fire shelter swung dull silver below the line gear strapped on his back. “Ski patrol, here I come.”
A different voice offered a sexier option. Long snowed-in days, longer starred-out nights, in our cabin with no call for curtains. Who needs money when she’s got a honey?
Calla felt a breeze caress her jawline. She brushed her glove, hard, over the tingle in her skin.
George tried to teach communities about prescribed burns, along the edge between private and public land, to lessen hazards for both homeowners and firefighters. Huge posters and flashy PowerPoints. Computer models showed the forest changing over time, past-present-future, with and without the proposed burns.
“You ever go to public meetings?”
Jed paused, standing on the switchback below Calla, nearing the bottom of the slope. “Shit. I’ve been to a bunch, touting all the benefits.”
“And how did people react to the options: a cluttered, dead-and-dying forest right behind their multi-million-dollar homes, or open and growing woodland, home to glorious mountain wildlife?”
“Free advice. They didn’t buy it.”
“Me and George made up chants to keep the pace when we were hiking our packs out to a pick-up road. Each member of the crew added a rhyme as the chant worked its way down.”
In the valley’s hushed stillness, Calla heard a new version. Smoke! My views! My coke! Hachooz! She shook her head, not smiling.
Their boots wrestled through the hillside’s jumbled stems, onto a wide levelled pathway. “Courtesy of some pricey motorized brush-cutting machine,” Jed waved her onto the path, “certain to enhance the peaceful hideaway of your most exclusive dreams.”
“These people’re only here a couple weeks a year, with whoever they need to impress. The racket would be well gone before their arrival.” Her eyes shifted from the overblown buildings ahead to the colors at her feet, gathering the diffuse light to themselves. She had expected splashy gardens, no doubt tended by hired ski-bums, seeds and weeders both imported. Surprisingly, some attempt at natural landscaping had been made, so it was less what was growing here that remained problematic, as what wasn’t. The less-showy groundsels, the fleabanes and asters and vetches, all missing.
Jed’s stomach growled loud enough to turn her head. It was one of the only sounds in the neighborhood. Horse trailers had hauled off all the expensive equines days ago so they could wait somewhere with clearer air. Their shining white-vinyl-fenced pastures seemed ghostly empty, especially with the gray smoke beginning to gather into loping, fantastical shapes.
Calla squirted water into her glove to splash her face. “Count the chimneys on this one.” Ahead of them stood a turreted behemoth with deliberately irregular cedar shakes on complicated rooflines, the many angles perfect catchments for winter ice buildup, each wing and level separate enough to need its own heat.
“Seven visible on the main house, a stone fireplace on the porch, another fireplace on that flag-stoned patio dining area.” Jed held up nine fingers.
“You missed one.” Resting near a fish-cleaning cabin that gleamed with stainless steel counters visible through the screened porch, an enormous open firepit provided creekside seating. She moistened her lips. “These people like fire.”
How much?
She tripped. “Tens of millions of dollars—means something to someone.”
Is that what this decision means to you?
She looked down at the tattered spruce cones under her feet, and kicked them out of her way. Was she talking back to the voices in her head?
This was not her voice.
She heard Jed’s boots bump up against the stained cedar of the wide, wrap-around porch. The creek matched the sounds of the aspen leaves as the distant, invisible fire cooked up new air currents in the day’s growing heat. A couple hours still before noon. She cocked her head, listening, but the birds were already on siesta. She moved to get a good look through the huge picture windows, but her reflection obscured the view inside. Her long blonde braid under the hardhat shone unexpectedly fair. Her sweaty face, bereft of ash, seemed odd, the only darkness in its scrubbed and sun-screened pale being the repeating circles of her eyes and the narrow slash of her lips. Unsettled, she held her hand up to erase the glare, and peered through the shaded pane.
Powder room with custom French tile work, laundry room, mud room, chef’s kitchen, pantry plus butler’s pantry. Calla heard George’s best British accent, falsely cheery, as if forcing away a hovering melancholy.
On lazy winter mornings, with coffee in bed, they would read each other real estate ads on the newspaper’s back cover.
Hand-tooled hickory flooring, game room with custom pool table, gym, loft. So, are we in the gym today? Or playing games?
She wasn’t going to answer that. Through heavy windows she could see the great room included the requisite wildlife of a businessman’s backcountry refuge.
Jed liked what he saw in there. “Those elk and mule deer mounts—every one has non-traditional antlers.”
To Calla, the horns had tortured shapes, and the animals’ unseen chests were pinioned against the high walls as if they’d been driven through, then stopped short, unable to push forward, unable to retreat. Other, unknown beasts from distant continents joined them, equally colonized. Their black marble eyes glistened from opposite walls.
She pushed away from the windows, breathing hard again, and walked around the porch to the back side of the house. In cool shadows provided by a dangerous proximity to the heavily-wooded slope, two oversized hammocks were slung at convivial angles to each other. She could use something like that.
Couldn’t we all?
Jed was still trying to name all the different trophy species. Calla shed her pack, stretched her shoulders in circles, tipped her head up, neck exposed, watching the uppermost branches shifting and braiding with incoming smoke. Nothing would erase her childhood love for this smell. Family barbecue in their southern Utah backyard, her mother slipping thin strips of home-made pickle into a slit she cut across the top of the tofu dogs. Her father in his Bureau of Land Management baseball hat, cutoff jeans and untied firefighter boots propped up on a stump too dry to rot out. Squat juniper trees hardly taller than she was at fifteen, no other kids to compare growth rates to.
When she first moved to Wyoming eight years ago, Calla just wanted taller trees. One end of the first hammock was tied to a tall, live tree. The other, though, was secured to a mature lodgepole, nine inches in diameter, a favorite size for beetles, and they hadn’t missed it. The tree had tried to heal itself, stiffened sap boils clogging beetle holes. It still held some green needles, breathing deceptively, conversing with its neighbors. But the frass the beetles had left at the base of the tree showed the mortal extent of their dining.
I’m not dead yet.
But look at ya, you’re nearly dead.
Ok, this was getting weird. More weird than just being tired. She laughed, like the half-helpless laughing she remembered from a Christmas night watching Monty Python with George and a six-pack of beer, seasonally flavored with pumpkin and cranberry. They laughed until tears rolled down their necks.
“What’s going on back here?” Jed arrived, looking around, as if wondering who she’d found evading the evacuation.
“I miss her so much.” She crawled into a hammock.
“This’ll be her favorite kind of memorial.” His eyes travelled along the well-designed nooks, small staff tables, tool shed with frost-free faucet and a neat stack of buckets. “Yep.” He encountered no resistance when he tugged on the door to the mini-fridge, attached to the outside of the shed. “Living in a gated valley prevents the need for things like padlocks.” He handed her a bottle.
“Days like this call for lemonade.” From a half-upright sprawl in the woven arms of the hammock, she rolled it against her cheeks, across the bony ridges of her eyebrows.
“Hard lemonade, chilled to a point of fascination.” He joined her in the other hammock and kicked back, letting it sway.
She licked the bottle’s saltless sweat before she twisted the top free. With a bursting release, a carbonated cloud rose in a snowier shade of gray to meet the general pallor that had settled now over everything. Her ear close to the bottle’s mouth, she listened to bubbles bursting. Then she took them past her lips and let them fizz around her tongue before swallowing.
“So that’s your answer to the day’s burning question—a burp?”
“Shall we be Saviors or Villains?” She watched the trees, fusee pocket digging comfortably into her hipbone. “No rushing into that answer.”
Julian Leung, “Yellowstone on film”, photograph
The wind began squirreling around, dragging dust into mini-tornados at the base of the hill. She felt the same way. The next closest buildings looked to be at least a quarter-mile further down the meadow, along kale-colored meanders with willows well-sculpted by the Manors’ now-missing moose. “Onward.”
They swung along the woodchipped pathway. Jed chattered. “I bet these fishermen love hedging on about mortgage rates and underfunded subsidies.”
She turned her radio down, tired of hearing about water dips to fill fat blivet tanks, tired of their carefully-aimed, merlot-colored slurry drops.
Lookout. Communications. Escape route. Safety Zone. Dammit. Wake up!
Calla turned the radio down some more, then remembered George wasn’t on that frequency. Fine then, if she wanted to argue. YOU were the lookout and what good did communications do you? Other than getting everyone else out to safety?
Just turn it back up, ok?
Calla’s stomach growled. She blamed her crankiness on hunger, and obligingly turned the volume up a single tick. Jed already neared the second place, a fairy tale Swiss Alps timber-frame with heavy curved beams holding up gabled ends. It also sported courtyard outfitters with huge grills and a wood-burning pizza oven. She approached the horse stables, which surrounded an interior courtyard, the main building ahead covering eight thousand square feet, easy. On her way past, Calla peered into open stall doors, a few discrete road apples left behind in their nests of clean wood shavings, fragrantly collecting yellow-bottomed flies.
Like Goldilocks, she stepped up the wide stairs to the glass-and-metal cantilevered front door. Jed was waiting for her. “The handle doesn’t turn.”
She leaned against it, then her mouth tilted up, a callous and hungry grimace. “Dumbshits. It’s only actually locked if you pull the frickin’ door closed.”
They pushed through into the foyer, both looking for something edible. But this space, she would call it a “living” room only with quotes around the word, was flanked by a series of foodless bedroom suites. Log and leather furniture lounged on wool rugs over patterned tiles. “They didn’t even leave any peanuts out,” Jed said, tossing a burled redwood platter like a frisbee onto the couch.
She descended a circular staircase and found the lower level dining area, with more glass windows looking over the meadow as it too dropped along a series of small creek cascades. Poking about in the stainless steel kitchen, they discovered many choices. “Duck breast and pate’?” “Not for me.” Round loaves of crisply crusted breads, still redolent with herbs. Jars of sliced Italian truffles in olive oil. She popped pistachios in her mouth while she tried to make up her mind. Curado Manchego cheese, from Spain, aged six months, smelling smoky, looking expensive. Jed didn’t bother with a knife, just sank his teeth into it like a huge rat. “Gonna get a lot smokier before we’re done.” He added his Cheshire cat smile.
She located a crock of huckleberry ice cream, and a big spoon. “Have to give ‘em credit for buying local. My friends’ kids raise the goats this comes from.” They stepped out the sliding doors onto the landscaped patio to enjoy their feast. Jed chased after the flying ashes, some big as squirrels, but quieter.
Without a sound, the ice cream melted into her throat. Her teeth gained a little purchase on the slightly-sour, slightly-soapy huckleberries, a grizzly bear favorite. In her memory, mosquitoes challenged her patience.
Quit your giggling. Bears are attracted by giggling.
Bears are attracted by scents, not sounds.
Well, quit making sense then.
Are you gonna get your underwear outta my way?
But that would make sense, wouldn’t it?
Bears never interrupt a thrashing session.
Too bad mosquitoes don’t have the same manners.
Calla filled her spoon. Jed stood beside her. “Name the hazards,” she prompted.
“Propane tanks, power systems, outdoor lighting.”
“All artfully hidden.”
Think this is all an insurance racket? Even George got pissed. Not that it counted for anything at this point.
Calla tried to tease her out of it. “Get thee to a nunnery—you have no appreciation for life’s finer elements.”
“Say what?” Jed was staring at her.
“Just something I used to say to George all the time.” She swallowed another mouthful of ice cream.
George never stayed mad long. These elements ain’t fine enough for you? She tickled Calla with an abandoned feather.
A radio voice cut the air. “Teewinot Fire Dispatch, Cannon. Are you on the fire?”
Her hand twitched, then stilled. Maybe her father was on the fire somewhere too.
“Cannon, Calla Cannon, this is Teewinot Fire Dispatch. Please report your location.”
Well, she hoped he wasn’t, then. He might get confused. Like he had been when he met the esteemed George.
“Turner, Teewinot Fire Dispatch, please report your location.”
Don’t you wish you knew?
“Turner, Jed Turner, this is Teewinot Fire Dispatch.”
“Our crew must be awake.” Jed pitched the last of the cheese across the manicured lawns.
Calla returned the ice cream to the freezer, left her un-rinsed spoon in the sparkling sink. The day was darkening, and a quick flash of lightning pointed directly at Moose Run Manor number three.
“Did you see that?” Jed bounced on the balls of his feet.
“Isn’t that how a vengeance story works?” She deepened her voice. “Each one must be known.”
They made their way toward the back side of the final house. The fire, just beyond the valley, created its own weather now, and the smoke columns of pyro-cumulus rose and fell unpredictably. She hardly noted the details of architecture, opulence no longer attracting even her revulsion. She trudged behind Jed, listening to the wind.
They had rappelled onto this fire at each of its three different units over the past fourteen days, new territory to understand each time, wield the chainsaw and swing the Pulaski, try to sleep on the tilted ground, saw and dig, hike out, start over. From their hovering ship, only ten seconds each to slide down two-hundred-fifty feet of rope onto the ground. Always deployed in the hard-to-access portions of the fire. Line gear slung in belly bags as if they were trying out for roles as Santa Claus. Welcoming cargo loads after they’d landed, ripping into boxes with fuel and chain saws so they could go growling at the heels of the flames like hounds after mountain lions. Flank and pinch. Tactics not used by structural firefighters. Structure fighting, for them, an unfamiliar sport.
Jed was toying with a remote controlled wall-sized entertainment center when she found him. “Ready for a little required rest?” He patted the bright geometric cover on the couch beside him. “No sense wasting all this without enjoying it first.”
Calla wasn’t ready to decide how to deal with these houses. “You enjoy,” she mumbled. The bedrooms beckoned.
A calming palette of ebony, taupe and seal, with minimalist furnishings and floor-to- ceiling windows, each suite comes with a full bathroom, wet bar and additional half-bath.
She pulled a tall, hand-crafted beer from the bar and poured it, frothing, into two fluted blue wine glasses. Before she let herself collapse on the turned-back sheets, she surveyed the minimalist aesthetic of this room—larger than their whole cabin back in Moon Valley. Steel and stone accents along massive amounts of glass whispered ‘winter’ even as summer broiled over the ridges and through the dying forests. She sank onto an eiderdown comforter.
Forests don’t die.
George was dead. Calla clinked the two glasses together. Fires cleanse, cultivate, replenish. Lodgepole pine cones open to fire’s fevered touch. Only mixed with ash can the seeds bind themselves over to new life. Though Calla mixed with ash all season, the seeds of a new world had failed to open.
What are you waiting for?
I brought the fusees. I’m just so tired.
Rest here first. I’ve learned to appreciate these things.
You’ve learned nothing.
Try me.
Calla slid the buttons of her Nomex out of their holes, and sank, a drift of ash or snow in her eyes. Her nose was full of the smell of George, George’s summer scent of charred wood and beer. Glass broke on the carved headboard’s woodland scene. Calla felt a languorous tongue drying spilled beer from her skin. Her t-shirt rolled up as she settled deeper, and a fine warm breath crossed her belly. Her toes, still inside her boots, twitched and spread, and curled. The backs of her knees sweated. She knew she had work to do. She couldn’t do it. Yet.
Rest and replenish. I can help.
That’s what I figured you’d say.
The bedsheets were damp and tangled by the time she rose and pulled her t-shirt back over her head.
She tapped her Pulaski against Jed’s boots to wake him. They left the movie playing, and the shifting octaves of Heath Ledger’s Joker followed them out the door. An up-valley wind from this lower outlet moved random ash toward the two houses they had passed.
Wind yanked at her, but her hands were too busy to push the hair out of her eyes. Each red fusee stick had its own striker cap on the hot end, and a spike on the other end to poke into any available extension. She pulled open the pocket, and her fingers gripped the first stick. These weren’t the same people who owned the house that killed George. Or were they?
Through the trees, around the house’s many edges, along the roof’s overhang, wind rang with a jazz band’s dissonant sounds. The slow year that had spun past gave them this confluence of remembrance and opportunity. A lonely anger flowed out of the steaming caldera under her boots, and Calla felt the volcano rising. She startled at a lava flash at the edge of her vision. A fox stretched, nose lifted above reaching paws, then dropped to the warm soil. They watched each other through waving grass and pastel blooms of wild hollyhock. She could see the dark nose twitching. Calla inhaled, trying to grab the scent of the day’s music.
“Jed—what color is that fox?” In her head, options drifted past. Apricot. Fall huckleberry leaves. Rust. Fresh brick. Sunkist Dreamsicle. Sorrel.
“What fox?” He squinted through the duskiness, fusee in his hand.
With her smudged glove, she pointed. “There, under that tall sage. By the chokecherry.”
Jed cocked his head.
She tried to remember what a female fox would be called. Vixen? “Is a male fox just called a dog?”
“Tod, or toddler, something like that,” Jed answered. “But I don’t see him.”
“The grass is so dry, she’s kinda camouflaged.” She fumbled for the right answer, the right shades. “Cider?” Winter evenings while George painted, Calla bent apple branches and alder-wood into rocking chairs.
Burnt sienna at sunrise. Magic at low light angles.
“It’ll run away just fine, whatever it is. Let’s get this pumpkin rolling, before it’s too late.”
“Jed.” She held a hand up, as if signaling a cattle dog to wait. “I want someone to find my dirty spoon, an unmade bed, our empty bottles.” Besides, the cedar and redwood, marble and satin and mounted wildlife in these houses were not to blame. “But they’ll nail us up and leave us to bleed out, you know.”
He stared at her. “I want someone to find themselves a different retreat. On the coast or something. Keep their fucking houses away from the forest.”
“A backburn will scare them away.”
“And the houses would still be here. So, no.”
“George died keeping houses from burning. I don’t think burning houses down is the message we’re supposed to be getting.” She looked toward the chokecherry. The fox was already gone.
Jed’s eyes streamed. With one hand, he swiped at his leaking nose, while the other hand poked a fusee onto three feet of fallen doug-fir branch. He followed her to a slight bench in the hill slope. Together, they held hissing flame to the accumulated needles. They stood above the house and sent the flames away, toward the still unseen working fire.
Dripping flame, Calla breathed out and walked, slow enough to ensure no tripping in the irregular underbrush. They made a semi-circle above the house, watching fire move uphill, and up the valley’s edge. “Leave a strip of trees between the buildings and the burned slope, maybe enough to hide the black hill from the closest windows.”
“I’m sure the owners will appreciate our thoughtfulness.” Jed’s third fusee was lit, and fire scrambled away from him.
But its path was erratic. She looked up at the dark cloud overhead, smoke trailing in bulges and in grayish bison tossing shaggy heads, stomping cloven hooves. A herd of bison, dust and sweat and drumming legs, pounded against her forehead. Sweat oozed into her eyes.
Just the kind of help I should have predicted. Calla didn’t bother to speak out loud now, though loss of control raged through the muscles in her throat.
George’s voice was gentle, almost sad. No predicting everything, though, is there?
From ahead of her, Jed yelled. “Shit, Calla. Watch out.”
The collapsing column drove the fire back – down into the meadow. Calla saw it testing the logs of the house where they had eaten. Then a long arm, godlike, stretched to stroke the trees where their lemonade hammocks were secured. Both houses began to shimmer and shine in the growing darkness, lighting up the teeth that devoured them.
Watching the backing fire, Calla ripped open her belt buckle and unspooled the belt from its loops in one whipping pull, unburdening her hips. The fusee pocket, still half-full, fell at her feet, as did her radio and fire shelter. She grabbed the fusees and chucked them at the face of the oncoming dragon. It licked down the slope, ignoring the too-bitter, too-moist willows, and dropped sparks on the woodchip path, leading in their direction.
Julian Leung, “Yellowstone on film”, photograph
They ran toward the house, circling its perimeter on an elevated redwood walkway. She paused. Light flowed onto the building, well ahead of the flames, shattering into rainbows on spider webs, taut and intricate. In a momentary hush, she heard the mad music of windchimes, and the splashing of a fountain around the front. She drew toward the sounds, strangely unhurried behind Jed’s long-legged sprint. The house’s main entrance door was a complicated piece of hammered copper artwork. As she passed, she swung her Pulaski high. Its axe-blade lodged in the door’s center.
She followed Jed onto the mowed lawn. He had kicked in a ground-level window, and with his boot heels cleared sharp glass from the edges. He curled down, swung inside, dropped. “Calla, get down here. They’ve got a basement sprinkler system.”
She shrugged out of her pack, dropping it on the lawn. Then she felt rain. But, no. Water lifted from below her feet. The irrigation had turned on.
See, I told you I could help.
She ran, laughing, as the wind careened around the valley’s narrow end. She heard Jed still shouting her name. Giddy with relief and possibility, she cartwheeled in her heavy boots, water squirting through her fingers. The lawn ran out at the edge of a slate-stone plaza.
She stood, entranced. Curved rock work created the fountain’s lake-sized pool. Tripod stands around the edges supported hummingbird feeders and planters with showy annuals. Piebald koi swam against a current among bench-backed stones. The fountain was, unsurprisingly, a mermaid, mossy patina on bronze, of course. Like a figure skater, the mermaid appeared to spin in the echo of stone curvature around her, head flung back, her arms out, back arched over doubled tail fin. This position sent her breasts jutting skyward, and from her dark nipples sprayed the clear water that sang into the pool, cooling the air. Air that had changed now, cinder gray to organic brown, with copper highlights. Air that wanted to burn.
Even through the lawn sprinklers, blowing ashes carried fire. Calla bent to untie her boots, pulling quickly at the purple laces, so dark in the ashy world that the yellow smiley faces flicked through her fingers like a cartoon strip. She kicked the boots off and unsnapped her green fire-resistant pants. She unbuttoned her shirt and set it down over the pants, neat and ready to slide back on, as always. Then she eased over the edge of the pool and dipping her head under, soaked her eyebrows, fine nose hairs, the long braid. Otter-like, flipping onto her back, she stroked over to the fountain. The fire’s fingers seemed to pluck blossoms from the plants around the pool’s edge, settling them purposefully onto the water’s surface.
Even surrounded by water, she couldn’t be sure of survival. Scorched lungs were a predictable way to die. In a fluid roll, she dove. In glassed-off niches placed along the bottom of the pool, lights brought to sudden, wavering life an artist’s vivid and exotic landscape. More disconcerting, piped-in music reverberated through the waves—bizarre rattling behind wooden flutes, and hypnotic voices in an unknown language. Other mermaids, periwinkle-skinned, with overlapping mother-of-pearl scales at their waists, swam ahead of her, beckoning. But—this three-dimensional world was painted on a flat pool bottom, the air above lurid tropical plants only a mirage.
She surfaced, desperately-needed oxygen sizzling through her teeth. The fully-involved house pulled at her eyes. Live koi slipped their shadows among painted creatures, tickling Calla’s knees. Dolphins pink as a sunset cavorted deeper into the pool, fire flashing overhead. Disorientation flooded her, gravity having lost its compass, painted leaves waving.
Her breath clogged with the air’s thick fumes. The burning house’s heat pitched higher, and Calla’s eyes stung. The sky filled with orange cormorants, exhaled from the patterned yellow snout of an eared serpent. She sought cooler air below a rock’s edge, an invisible layer of calm. She splashed water, now heating beyond comfort, over her face. She panted, heat drying her eyebrows in one breath, her nose in the next. By the third breath, her throat began to crackle.
Superheated air always precedes the flame front.
George’s voice chased her back underwater. She was afraid of the bronze mermaid’s hot kiss, and afraid too of a life without George’s whispered audacities, teeth on her earlobes.
A fish slid through the buckskin trunks of strange trees, their bent knees forming dark tunnel entrances. Real koi or painted piranha, she could no longer tell. Dolphins pointed her at a brilliant-hued pagoda, alternating floor tiles of lemon fleur de lis with glittering lapis lazuli. She swam. The arched door shone in deep mahogany, and its faceted rose quartz knob was turning.
Calla’s chest stretched with pain. Moving forward, she flung her arms wide, her fingertips connecting ancient aquifers with shifting quicksilver clouds far above earth’s burn. Her cry of joy echoed, inaudible.
Julian Leung, “Yellowstone on film”, photograph
