to offer. Most end up shrugging. Always the same shrug, one that makes it clear that there is no single reason they could state and at the same time believe to be true.
Miles thought he might have been slightly different on this count. He loved the job no less than the other men and women he has worked with, but he believed that in his case he could take a stab at explaining why.
‘Fire isn’t like us,’ he would tell Alex when she asked what he saw when he came closest to the flames. ‘It never forgives.’
Sometimes, when he watched how a low, desultory smoker would tiptoe far enough along to touch off a dry thicket, Miles could see himself in the orange spirals, his own hunger devouring the arthritic limbs. He had heard fires described as cruel but he never saw them that way. What he recognized instead was how they were destructive only because they could be, the flames liberated by perfect indifference. Even before he was burned, he had this same talent himself.
This is why he’d come to this place out of all the end-of-the-world places he could have run to. There was nobody here that he knew, to remind him of who he was. Nobody he’d made a promise to or ever would. And there was fire.
For a while, though, he considered other options. For the better part of his first year on the road, driving from prairie town to prairie town across Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Montana, Alberta and back again in a flat, pointless circle, he thought about bartending. He was spending most of every night in bars at the time anyway, and could see himself on the other side of the divide, pulling the taps and free pouring the rye, keeping an eye on the loudmouths and, when need be, directing the worst of them out the door with the end of his boot. There wouldn’t be much trouble on his shifts, at any rate. He found that the scars did a lot to maintain order all on their own. There was a warning in the marks on his cheek that common, hayseed pugilists had to take into consideration. But even with all of these qualifications, Miles knew he wouldn’t last a week. It wouldn’t be the job, but the temptation to talk. He might be invited to barbecues or bowling tournaments or waitresses’ rented rooms, and be asked questions that, over time, he would allow himself to answer.
For these reasons, Miles knew that if he wanted to run away he’d have to come back to fires. To his surprise, this was fine with him. Even after what had happened he still loved them, his dreams recalling the purposeful digging at the feet of a blaze he’d arrived at early enough to contain at least as often as the Mazko River blowup, the one fire he had ever been caught in. Alex knew all of this about him. It was the only clue that, once he was gone, she believed might lead her to him. And now it has.
‘Have you been here the whole time? In this town, I mean?’
They are the first words either of them has spoken since they walked out of the Welcome Inn. The sun had not yet surrendered to the reach of the hills, and there was enough light left in the evening sky to blind them. For the first few minutes the three of them could only shuffle, stunned, through the gravel streets.
‘Ross River,’ Miles says.
That’s it. I saw the name on the sign.’
‘Five years.’
‘You must like it.’
‘Five years isn’t that long.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Not so long that you have to like where you spent them.’
Alex and Miles walk with their heads down, the girl running ahead and back again like a herd dog, circling behind and nudging their calves. They take the road down to the river, past the tiny, unpainted church, with its steeple of shining aluminum. Beyond it, they find the path through the empty lot where Lloyd’s Gas & Tackle once was. Miles glances up at the one remaining pump standing crooked, its glass face cracked, and sees it as a bespectacled man struggling to his feet after a beating.
When they reach the banks of the Pelly they watch the lengthening curls and peek-a-boo whirlpools of the current. The water heavy as oil, a glinting purple that conceals its depths. There are no sounds except for the buzz of the first mosquitoes awakening from the reeds, along with the river’s gulps and spits.
In the absence of words, Miles feels the first tickles of the moment’s strangeness. It seems to him that the woman and girl stand unnecessarily close, and a flurry of options occur to him. He might fall to his knees and explode into tears. Beg forgiveness. He might swing out his arms and knock them back.
All he can think of to hold off some show of madness is to keep talking. He tells them of how, last summer, he had been standing where they are now watching Margot play fetch with her dog, Missie. Over and over Margot would throw a stick out, and each time Missie would leap in, snatching it and cutting back to shore. Once, Margot threw the stick ten feet farther than before. Missie splashed into the swirls. This time, when she turned around with the stick in her mouth, the current grabbed her from below. The dog’s front legs punched forward in panic but she couldn’t break free of the water’s hold. Miles and Margot started out after her only to see that she was already too far, speeding out of sight around the bend behind the churchyard, down to join the Yukon and, eventually, the delta that empties into the Beaufort Sea.
‘Poor Missie,’ Alex says. ‘Poor Margot.’
‘It’s terrible. Now she’s only got Wade to follow her around.’
Miles tries at a laugh, but it comes out in a messy sneeze. And now that he’s told the story of the drowned dog, he realizes it was more grim than he remembered, and wonders if the girl might do something awkward. But instead, Rachel cups her chin in her palm, studying the site of the tragedy. When she turns to him her forehead is scrunched into serious ripples.
‘We can’t go swimming in that river,’ she says.
‘I’d advise against it.’
She shakes her head in regret. Then, in the next second, she snaps out of her grown-up considerations and sprints back up the road toward town.
Alex and Miles follow her past what Bonnie likes to call the Welcome Inn’s courtyard, no more than a patch of grass with what, from a distance, looks to be a garden gnome stepping out of his lederhosen. They turn right, past a row of squat mobile homes, most with something left out in their front yards. A standing stepladder. A pickup truck raised on its rims, its hood agape. A Mr Turtle wading pool.
They round the property of a cabin that appears to be made of nailed-together outhouses, all with grass growing high atop their roofs. Across the road, two boys sit side by side on a bench in front of a cinderblock building. Off to the side there’s a swing set, along with climbing bars that could be a cage from which something has already escaped, and between them, a slide designed to look like a dinosaur’s tongue.
‘Can I go play?’ the girl asks.
‘Play away, kiddo.’
‘How old is she?’ Miles asks once she has run off into the weed-riddled sand of the playground.
‘Five and a half.’
‘Really?’
‘How old do you think she could be?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I don’t have much experience on what five and a half is. What they’re capable of at that age.’
‘Rachel is capable of pretty much anything.’
They crunch over the stones at the side of the road, watch the girl scramble up the ladder of the dinosaur’s back and slide down its tongue. When she reaches the bottom she remains sitting on the aluminum lip. He tries to meet the girl’s eyes but she’s watching the two Kaska kids on the bench—Mungo’s son, Tom, and one of his more-silentthan-most friends, Miles can see now. After a time of wondering what to do next in a second-rate playground while being observed by two teenaged Indian boys, Rachel abruptly runs around and up the dinosaur’s back again. She pauses at the top and surveys the monkshood poking through the sand below. Then, with a regal salute, she plops on her bum and slides earthward a second time.
‘There