Sherman Alexie - War Dances

But near the end of the movie, as Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson were making out in a supply closet, Sherwin was surprised to discover that Karen was holding his hand and even more surprised when she started playing with his fingers. Their friends had no idea this was happening. Karen lightly ran her fingertips along Sherwin’s palm, the backs of his fingers, and his wrist. It was simple — and nearly innocent — but it still felt like sex.

Sherwin was not a virgin — he’d had sex with three girls — but this was the first time a girl had been so indirect with her desires. He’d touched naked women, but this hand-holding — this skin against skin — seemed far more intimate. He loved it. He was a Spokane Indian, the lead singer for his drum group, and had a sudden urge to sing an honor song for Karen — for her tenderness. He was nervous they’d be discovered. He knew their friends would be both titillated and slightly offended by this contact. It seemed like a betrayal of what was otherwise a platonic gathering. But Sherwin could not stop it. And Karen certainly didn’t want to stop it. He would never touch her again, and they would never speak of the moment and would not see each other again after high school, but Sherwin always considered it one of the best moments of his life.

So, years later, when he became a professional writer, Sherwin would tell curious journalists that he loved movies and his favorite movie of all time was The Breakfast Club, but he would never tell them why. He knew that the best defense against fame was keeping certain secrets. He hoped that Karen, wherever she was, would someday read an interview with him and smile when she read about his cinematic preference.

On August 11, 1948, sixteen smoke jumpers, led by a taciturn man named Wayne Ford, parachuted into Sirois Canyon, a remote area near Wenatchee, Washington, to fight a small wildfire. However, the fire, unpredictable as such fires can be, exploded into a fifty-foot-tall wall of flame, jumped the canyon, and chased the smoke jumpers up a steep and grassy hillside. Fifteen smoke jumpers tried to outrun the fire, an impossible race to win, but Wayne Ford didn’t run. Instead, he did something that was new and crazy: He built the first U.S. Forest Service escape fire.

Did you know that you can escape a fire by setting another fire at your feet? You might seem to be building a funeral pyre, but you’re creating a circle of safety. In order to save your endangered ass, all you have to do is burn down the grass surrounding you, lie facedown in the ash, and pray that the bigger fire will pass over you like a flock of blind and burning angels.

I know you’re thinking, You’re crazy. There’s no way I’m going to set a fire when another fire is already chasing me. And that’s exactly what Wayne Ford’s men thought. They had never seen any firefighter set one fire to escape another. It was unprecedented — for white folks. Indians had set many such escape fires before white men had arrived in the Americas, but Wayne Ford and his men had no way of knowing this.

Wise Wayne Ford — who before the fire had the same color and sinewy bite as one hundred and fifty pounds of deer jerky — could never fully explain why he set his escape fire. All he ever said is that it just made sense. Ford’s men tried to outrun the murderous flames, but one by one they all succumbed to the fire and smoke. Ford calmly lay down in the ash, in his circle of safety, and lived.

Thirty years after the Sirois Canyon fire, Harris Tolkin, a former smoke jumper, began to write a nonfiction chronicle of the tragedy, Fearful Symmetry: The True Story of the Sirois Canyon Fire. Tolkin borrowed the title of his book from the first and last stanzas of William Blake’s most famous poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In exploring the meanings of the Sirois Canyon fire and its aftermath, Tolkin relied heavily on William Blake’s notions of innocence and experience and on the dichotomies of joy and sorrow, childhood and adulthood, religious faith and doubt, and good and evil. Tolkin died before completing the book, but it was edited by his daughter, Diane Tolkin, and was posthumously published in 2002 and was a surprise New York Times best seller for twenty-six weeks. In 2003, Tesla Studios, fresh off a Best Picture Oscar for their Civil War epic, Leaves of Grass, approached a hot young short-story writer, poet and first-time screenwriter, Sherwin Polatkin, to adapt Fearful Symmetry for the big screen.

Sitting in the Tesla offices, Sherwin stared through a glass desk at the bare feet of the executive producer, a short thin man who was otherwise completely dressed in a gorgeous bespoke suit.

“So, Sherwin,” the producer said, “why are you here?”

That was a strange question, considering that Sherwin had been invited. He decided that it must be an existential query. Or no, maybe it was just the first question of a job interview. This was Hollywood, yes, but Sherwin was really just a typist — a creative typist — trying to get a job.

“Well, number one,” Sherwin said, “I know fire like no other screenwriter in this town. I was a hotshot, a forest firefighter, for ten summers. It’s how I paid for college.”

That was a lie. Sherwin had only fought one fire in his life — a burning hay bale — and he’d only had to pour ten buckets of water on it. But this executive had no way of knowing Sherwin was a liar. Wasn’t everybody in Hollywood a liar? Maybe Sherwin could only distinguish himself by the quality of his lies and not their quantity.

“And number two, I’m a Native American,” Sherwin said. “I’m indigenous to the West, to the idea of the West, and you’re not going to find that sort of experience in film school.”

That couldn’t be true. Wasn’t Hollywood filled with small-town folks from the West — hell, from everywhere? Wasn’t Hollywood filled with nomads? Yes, Jewish folks, those original nomads, created the movie business, and it had not really changed in all the decades since, had it? Wasn’t Sherwin really just one more nomad in a business filled with nomads? How could he really distinguish himself?

“Listen,” Sherwin said to the executive, “I’m nervous and I’m exaggerating, and I’m sounding like an arrogant bastard, so let’s just start over. Is that okay? Can we call cut and start this scene over? Can we do a reshoot?”

The executive smiled and tugged at his toes. Yes, they were well-manicured toes, but it was still disconcerting, in the context of a business meeting, to see something — ten things — so naked and — well, toelike.

“We’ve had about a dozen screenwriters work on this project,” the executive said. “And had three different directors attached. And none of them could crack this thing. So tell me, how are you going to crack it?”

Sherwin didn’t quite understand the terminology. He assumed it had something to do with secret codes and languages. So he went with that.

“Well, the book itself is a tragedy,” Sherwin said.

“Tragedies are fucked at the box office,” the executive said.

Sherwin didn’t know if that was true. It didn’t feel true. Or maybe it was truer than Sherwin wanted to believe. Weren’t Americans afraid of tragedy? As a Native American, Sherwin was, by definition, trapped in a difficult but lustful marriage with tragedy. But that cultural fact wouldn’t get him this job.

“I think there’s redemption in this story,” Sherwin said. “I know I can find the redemption.”

“Redemption,” the executive said. “Yes, that’s exactly what we need.”