Andrew Pyper - The Wildfire Season

Miles watches Jackson Bader look about him distractedly, pale and string-necked, and has the impression that the old man isn’t sure what he’s doing here. It’s not the confusion that comes with age or with discovering oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Bader is simply the kind of man who finds the company of strangers slightly absurd, useless, an expenditure of energy on those who, in all likelihood, you will never see again. Miles meets the man’s eyes and wonders if Bader has identified the same distance in him.

Now that he thinks of it, Miles has to concede that everyone here likely sees him as Bader does: the near-silent burn victim, friendless and grotesque. What people wonder about more than anything else are his scars. The muddy splotches that spill down the one side of his neck, his rib cage, and disappear below his waist. All anybody is sure of is they have reason not to ask him about it. Within months of his arrival, Miles earned a reputation as a merciless barfighter on the nights when the drink goes down him the wrong way, or if provoked, or if merely spoken to in what he interprets to be an unfavourable tone. Currently, he is one victim short of sending an even halfdozen down to Whitehorse on free medevac rides.

On these occasions, Miles spends the night under Terry Gray’s watch in the single cell of the RCMP office, apologizing for keeping Terry up late, and Terry telling him that he’s a lousy sleeper at the best of times and that he’d rather type up the assault charges against Miles than lie awake all night in his trailer. Most recently, it concerned a visiting miner who had affronted Ross River’s meagre charms by saying of Bonnie, ‘There’s better-looking barmaids back in the goddamn hole,’ referring to the all-male open pit mine in which he’d spent the last three weeks. For this offence, Miles had beaten the man into a long and dreamless sleep.

Terry Gray has started getting calls. ‘Hear you’ve got a real wild man on your hands up there, Sheriff,’ the superintendent down in Whitehorse will joke with him, but Terry knows it’s getting less funny all the time. He also knows about the stories. Tales of a monster whose rage has pursued him to the end of the world. He killed a pregnant woman in Prince George. He scarred his face blowing up a Hells Angels clubhouse in Edmonton, and a pack of murderous bikers have been spotted as far north as Carcross, asking after a guy with a fucked-up face. And a dozen other improvised myths. In fact, the Welcome Inn has become as famous in the rest of the territory for the brooding fire ranger who drinks in its bar as for its mouldy, overpriced rooms.

Mungo Capoose sees his boss differently.

‘Miles McEwan? He’s not so mean,’ is how Mungo likes to conclude any conversations concerning his boss’s character. ‘He’s just running away.’

‘From what?’ someone will ask.

‘From his face.’

‘But you can’t run from that.’

‘That’s why he’s gone as far as he has.’

There is also a figure visible to Miles alone. Standing in the shadows on the far side of the pool table that’s been too slanted to play an honest game on since Miles piledrived Wade onto it the first and only time he called him Scarface. Miles couldn’t say how long the figure has been there. It’s only when he stares at the one spot for a while that he can make out the outline of a person at all. The slumped shoulders. The pale reflection of unblinking eyes.

It stays where it is long enough that Miles wonders if it is only his own idle creation. Yet the figure is too inarguably there for him to pretend it couldn’t be. Its stillness prevents it from being wholly alive. This is what Miles tries to tell himself. The man in the shadows will remain a shadow until it can move.

And then it moves.

As it slides toward him, Miles counts the ways the shadow takes on colour. Khaki work pants splashed with what looks like machine oil. Eyes showing themselves to be unnaturally wide and red-rimmed. The head so bald it’s missing ears as well as hair.

Miles watches the man emerge from where there was nothing before, as though stepping out of the wall itself. When the tips of his boots slide into the light cast by the bare bulb nearest him, he stops.

Although the figure is tall, Miles can see that it belongs to a young man. A kid stretching his neck to show a face burned black. And smiling. His teeth long and shining as ivory keys.

With a spastic lurch Miles swings around on his stool. He pounds his fist against his chest to show the room it’s only a swig of beer that’s gone down the wrong way. Even when the others return to their conversations Miles refuses to look beyond the pool table.

‘Nice one.’

‘She is.’

‘Where’d you get her?’

‘Come up on a flatbed to Carmacks.’

‘Used?’

‘They’re all used. But this one’s not as used as others.’

Without asking, Miles knows that Wade and Crookedhead are talking about trucks. Men speak of half-tons up here in the same covetous, technical way that others might speak of power tools, laptop computers or women. Everything else that happens in Ross River might ultimately boil down to a tale of foolishness or mild humiliation to cling to its subject for years, but trucks alone are taken seriously. If he closes his eyes and listens selectively to the drinkers around him, Miles can pick out the names of the Big Three manufacturers, each brand spoken with reverence, as though ancient gods. Dodge. Ford. Chevy. Once, and only once, a Toyota made an appearance so scorned that its owner, Crookedhead James, was compelled to drive it to Whitehorse and sell it, coming home on the once-a-week bus with a hangover that made his nose run, four hundred dollars, and a gym bag of newish skin magazines.

‘Nice truck,’ Wade says again, although this time about a new arrival in the parking lot.

‘Wade?’ Margot calls. ‘Bring me and the Baders here another round, would you?’

After a time long enough to let Margot know she will later pay for addressing him in this way, Wade turns to the bar and leaves Crookedhead to follow whatever movement there is outside.

‘ Thank you, Wade,’ Mrs Bader gushes. ‘I’m not sure when I last had so much beer to drink. I mean, usually I just have a single gin, and that’s only at functions !’

Jackson Bader says nothing. Everyone in the room except for his wife has heard someone at the door, and they have shifted in their seats to see who will open it.

‘Oh, Margot. You’re so lucky to live way up here, where you can do things like this all the time—not just drink beer, but enjoy the real things. The wilderness. Cowboys and Indians! Good heavens. You’re not supposed to say Indian anymore, are you? And most of you are—well, I only meant—’

Elsie Bader’s face is slashed by the light coming in through the open door. It is against this illumination that two strangers appear. A woman in her late twenties holding the hand of a little girl.

The two of them come inside but the door remains jammed on a raised crack. The woman lifts her sunglasses. Without a change in either of their expressions she spots Miles and, after the most brief of pauses, the two step toward him.

The Welcome Inn patrons are a transfixed audience to their march. Everyone hopes, no matter what is about to take place, that the woman doesn’t ask Miles about the mottled burns that, in the sudden light, look like crimson ink splashed from his temple to his shirt collar.

Miles’s eyes won’t leave the little girl holding the woman’s hand. Her just-brushed hair shining blue against the twilight. A summer dress patterned with strawberries down to her mosquito-bitten knees. Maybe five. Maybe six.