Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

The others wait for an utterance equal to the scale of his offense. He too, for reasons of his own, seems to want to say more. He calls, “You not telling me your name, it just hurt my feelings, I lost it.”

At this skewed sincerity they laugh, and he sits down and reaches to accept the joint, and everyone in the mended, redeemed circle relaxes. Finn is almost asleep when she hears his voice again: “You know what I saw on TV last night. This bear. Polar bear. It teeters on this little dwindling raft of ice and it can’t stay where it is and it can’t go because there’s no other ice in sight, it’s swimming and swimming, this small, like a dog’s, polar bear head in a world of water, forever and ever water, this bear swimming hard against the drag of its fur with nowhere to swim to, nothing to climb out onto, ice gone, ice melted, and it’s despair, what he feels, what we feel, that is despair and we all know it , you think Mendocino is different, your safe hole to hide in, well wake the fuck up, they’re coming for the last scraps, who stops them? Us? Have we stopped them from screwing over the planet? Let me tell you their ideology. Want me to tell you their ideology? Take take take take take take take. Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill. ” When he says kill they hear not only fucked up and pissed off , there’s a personal element, some provocation an ordinary person could tolerate, which he, being crazy, can’t endure. “What’s coming should terrify us. Tell me this. Why aren’t we fucking terrified . Why don’t we do a fucking thing to stop them.” He gets to his feet. “Now it all falls on children .” He tilts his face up but the fire has died down and Finn doubts he can make her out against the darkness. He says, “She’s gonna see—,” and means her . He’s forgotten her name.

He tries again. “She’s gonna live to see—”

He’s forgotten the end of the sentence.

With soft concern, the kind that doesn’t presume to insist, someone drawls, “Come on, man, sit down, why don’t you sit down”—and other voices, fastidiously soft, tug at him. “Come on, it’s all right, sit back down, good, that’s good, don’t cry, it’s a beautiful night, you’re among friends, there’s the moon.”

Finn has things to fix — terrors, gaps in knowledge — that wolves can help with, and for a time, alongside her love of Mary, her passion for her mother’s weather-roughened fair skin and the wealth of her never-cut hair and her habit of rubbing a leaf between thumb and forefinger and asking the plant What’s wrong here? Am I missing something? and her woodsmoke, damp wool, and patchouli scent and her voice and the millet-flour pancakes she makes in their cast-iron skillet when she’s in a good mood with wild blackberries that burst and bleed inky streaks through the batter, alongside all of that Finn’s love of wolves runs parallel. Protective yellow-eyed posse: Agnes, Bone, Donedeal, Moody, Sid. Slipsliding through the woods with her. Finn can’t remember mentioning their existence ever, so how does Mary know? Mary says Sometimes it’s like that, beloveds from the life before stick with the child into the child’s new existence, and ignorants call them imaginary. Because they regard human doings with supreme contempt, there are limits to what the wolves can teach Finn. And one day Mary says Outgrow the fucking fairy tale, Finn. There are no wolves. There never were.

Not a road, you can’t call it a road, just the dirt ruts someone would drive down when the orchard needed attention. That time, the time when these trees badly needed pruning, came and went years ago, and now thickets of water shoots, pretty much impenetrable, swarm once-elegant branches. Mary’s lover, Teague, says the orchard is asleep . The last four or five winters were too warm, with so few chill hours that the trees — who break into blossom only after experiencing what they believe to be a whole winter’s worth of cold — never wake from dormancy. They have been stranded by global warming in a kind of dream. Teague likes explaining things about his land, even troubling things that keep him awake at night. Listen when I’m talking to you , Teague says. Finn was listening. He doesn’t like it when she tells him so. Why do you have to piss him off , Mary says, pressing a rustling bag of frozen peas to Finn’s jaw. After a couple of tries, Finn perfects a listening expression. Finn has to climb several trees before finding an apple. She twists it from its twig. Where some old trees were taken out there is a shaggy clearing sheltered from rough wind, hidden from low-flying planes, perfect for Mary’s little darlings. From her loft Finn hears Teague say There’s shit kids need , and when Mary says Like what he says Like has she ever had a birthday cake? Wherever Mary goes, Teague’s dog follows at a bowlegged pitbull trot. The handsomer the man the uglier the dog , Mary says. Do your thing, goofball goonface , Mary says, scratching what’s left of a torn-off black ear. Pitbull pee is the flashing neon keep-out sign of the animal world. As backup, tarnished spoons clink and tinsel shimmers along strands of salvaged wire strung trunk to trunk in a critter-proof perimeter, the plants leafing out in the grow-bags Finn and Mary drag into new, sunnier configurations as summer progresses. A real secret is one your life depends on , Mary says. The apple is as small as Finn’s fist, gone in five bites. Finn has taken to counting bites. Did you remember to feed her? is one of the accusing questions Teague aims at Mary. If he finds out about the grow, he’ll do more than accuse. It’s his land, he’s supposed to know what’s going on. Even if he didn’t know, he can still lose the land, that’s the law. The bigger danger is the patch being found by accident and ripped off. Say some new guy came to work for Teague , Mary said, then I’d worry. The beauty of this semiwild sixty-acre slice of Mendocino is that it’s too much for Teague to handle without help, and he puts off hiring help because he’s paranoid. The downside is that in Teague’s paranoia he’s convinced Mary cheats on him. They can’t stay. My fucking luck , Mary says. Those seeds came from Afghanistan.

Dev plays guitar in a band with gigs throughout the county and even, two or three times that winter, down in the city, where Mary wears high heels and a vintage dress with pansies on it and they eat Chinese. In potholed parking lots outside bars in Arcata and Hopland and Forestville, Finn finds quarters, earrings, condoms she knows better than to touch, a lipstick whose red Mary likes, a dog collar complete with tags, a real bullet, a run-over T-shirt that, uncrumpled, says Mendocino Fire and was a fireman’s, Dev says, and then says We should look for a puppy to go with that collar. Someone, a drunk, breaks the van’s left taillight with a baseball bat. For no reason, Mary says. Wrapped in an old flannel shirt of Dev’s, zipped in his sleeping bag against the cold in the rear of the van, Finn sleeps alongside instrument cases and the sawdust-sweet carpentry tools of Dev’s day job. All night the van is a tin drum for the rain. Most mornings she gets to school. A cough ransacks her chest and scrapes her throat raw. When the shoplifted thermometer says 104, Dev sings If that mockingbird don’t sing, Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring and by dawn her forehead is cool under Mary’s palm. Far out in the country a curve of road stampedes her heart and right there is the dirt drive that winds to Teague’s house. She studies Mary’s profile. Nothing. When Dev likes the song on the radio, he turns it up high and they all sing.