On Fire (7 page)

The sun is well up by now, the surface of the lake brilliant with only a swirl of motion underneath. Virgil points to the long, wispy cloud trails above them. “There's your horses,” he says. “Mare's tails. Means a change in the weather.”

Dan follows the sweep of Virgil's arm with his eyes. Then looks back down at the water. “How deep is it here?” he asks.

“Don't know,” Virgil says. “Never been to the bottom before.”

He motions toward the life jacket crumpled on the floor of the boat. “It's for my little cousin Charlene. You ever meet her?”

“No.”

“It's just as well. She's a holy terror. Anyway, that jacket won't fit you, but you feel free to grab a hold of it if we go under.” He adjusts the throttle and they pick up speed.

Nothing can track a human over water. Does Virgil say that? Or is it the lake itself reassuring Dan? He stares at its shining surface. He'd like to travel in Virgil's boat forever and let the world slip quietly by.

2
S
LEEP

T
HERE ARE STEEP WHITE BLUFFS ON
the Cato City side of the lake. They're streaked with black in places. And with rusty brown. Virgil turns the boat and moves it parallel to them until a break suddenly opens up in the rock.

He guides the boat through that and into a sheltered harbour with a beach of black and tan pebbles. He ties up to a float made out of deadheads chained together, takes off his shoes and holds them over his head. Then he slips into water that rises up to his ribs.

“Isn't there any easier way?” Dan calls after him.

“Sure,” Virgil calls back. “A bit farther north we built a pretty solid dock. But this is the one I use. People I bring here to fish want to feel like they're getting the real thing.”

He stops and turns. “It's a hot day. Water feels good. You don't expect me to carry you, I hope?”

“No.”

“Because you can sit in my boat all day if you want to. But if you're still here when I wake up, you'll have to go down to Kingman with me.” Virgil puts his shoes on again and begins to climb a steep path sheltered from the lake by aspen and lodge pole pine.

“What's in Kingman?” Dan calls.

“People.” Virgil's voice comes out of the trees. “Supplies. Nothing burning.” He continues to climb and soon he's out of sight.

By the time Dan gets to the shore he's exhausted. He picks a grassy area sheltered by a dense stand of trees and lies down. He hears waves lapping quietly at the rocks on the shore. Lichen crumbling those rocks into sand. Ravens and nuthatches announce the passing of time before he closes his eyes and drifts into silence.

The sun is far in the west when he opens his eyes again. It takes him a moment to establish where he is. Then he stands up and stretches his long spine.

The wind has picked up. He walks out from the cover of the trees and feels how it's scuffing up the surface of the lake. The sky has changed, too.

It's all clouds now and there's a darker charcoal smudge like a giant thumbprint moving over the mountains on the other side. It becomes a fist, and then while he watches, opens out into a hand groping toward him.

An omen, he thinks. It may not be safe here after all. Maybe he should go with Virgil to Kingman and then slip away.

He walks back toward the float and stands looking at it for quite a while before he puts words to what's wrong.

The boat is gone.

Virgil has left without him.

3
T
HE
D
EAD
A
RE
A
LWAYS WITH
U
S

D
AN OFTEN HAS TO STOP AND
get his breath as he climbs the steep path up from the lake. To his left he begins to see piles of decaying wood, and then further on, the broken bones of houses. Here and there a stone chimney or the skeleton of a roof survives. All around he hears a mournful sighing.

When he finally finds an A-frame with its roof on tight, he mounts the steps to the front deck. The door is locked. He knocks. Rattles the handle. He even shoves his shoulder against the door, but nothing responds except a few aspen leaves, withered from the drought. They drop to the ground and the wind eddies them around his feet.

There are two Adirondack chairs on the deck. He sets his pack down and sits in one of them. He can see all the way down to the lake and across to the nightmare on the other side. Lightning flashes. He counts to five before he hears the following thunder.

He leaves the chair then. Moves to the floor in front of the deck railing and hunches his back against what's happening across the water.

The sky grows dusky while he huddles there. What's left of the sun shows blood red. The wind increases, tearing at the trees and flinging branches down around him, but his hearing is so acute he's still able to detect someone breathing up behind him.

It's quiet breathing — the soft inhale and exhale of a sleepwalker sneaking up on his dreams. He turns and sees Virgil holding a flashlight in his hand. “When did you come back?” Dan asks.

“I never left,” Virgil says. “Why don't you go inside?”

“The door's locked.”

“Of course. It's private property.” Virgil's light moves around to the side door of the cabin and Dan follows. “People usually hide a key under their door mat,” Virgil tells him. “You take it and open the door.”

Dan bends over to look, but there's no key there.

“Or,” Virgil says, pointing at a pane of glass in the door, “you break this and let yourself in. Careful, though. Wrap something around your arm so you won't be cut.”

Dan takes a T-shirt out of his back pack and uses it for protection. One tap and his arm is through.

There's food in the cupboards: pork and beans. Tuna fish. Vegetable soup. Their labels glow in the murky light. “Get a can opener and help yourself,” Virgil says. He shows Dan where to look.

The power is turned off so Dan eats the beans cold — goes on eating until he can't make any more go down. Then he unlocks the front door and goes out to where Virgil is standing on the deck. It's dark as pitch outside now and the lake has turned to fire. He hears the forces of nature all around him.

“Are you afraid of the dead?” Virgil asks.

“Why?”

“Take a look.” Virgil holds up the flashlight and Dan sees that they're everywhere — roosting up in the trees.Sitting on the deck railing.On the stairs.On the rocks beyond that. And more are coming.

They're riding on horseback or in carriages and mining cars. Or they're walking. Sometimes carrying each other. Sometimes crawling. They're even rappelling down from the steep cliff behind the cabin.

There are thousands of them, all the colour of cobwebs.

“Word got out,” Virgil says. “And nobody new has been here for quite a while.”

The ghosts turn their heads in Dan's direction. They stare at him through empty eye sockets. “They can be unnerving if you're not used to them,” Virgil says. “And these are the most presentable.”

“What do they want?” Dan asks. He moves back toward the door.

“Some of them are hungry.” Virgil points to a group at the back who hold cracked bowls and plates up over their heads.

“Feed them, then. Take what's in the cupboard and tell them to go away.”

“It won't help,” Virgil says. “Their throats are full of sand and they can't get anything down.”

Dan feels the food from his own stomach pushing up against the back of his throat.

“In one way, they're just like you,” Virgil says. “They want to find a way out of here.”

“Why are they staring at me, then? You're the guide.”

“Partly true,” Virgil says. “I am supposed to guide
you
. It's too late for them though. And for me.” He begins to fade in and out while they talk. He removes his head and holds it briefly in the crook of his arm before replacing it again.

”I thought you might have noticed,” he says.

The dead move closer and closer to where Dan is standing. They hold up to him the few earthly possessions they've been allowed to save: a scrap of cloth from a child's dress. A photograph. Wreaths of dried flowers. A shaker of salt. Glass beads in a moose skin pouch.

They begin to pull at Dan's clothes with fleshless fingers. They touch his face and his hands. “Help us,” they cry. “Save us!”

“Get back!” Virgil commands. The arc of his flashlight cuts through the mass of their spectral bodies. He pulls Dan back inside the cabin.

There are iron horseshoes over all the doors and windows so the dead are forced to remain outside in the growing storm, crying and praying and consoling each other in their various languages.

When lightning flashes again and again in the sky, they begin to fade away, but they leave traces of sticky filament behind on everything they've touched.

4
D
REAM
J
UMPS

I
T'S PITCH DARK IN THE HOUSE
. Dan finds candles and matches in a kitchen drawer and takes them with him into the bedroom at the back of the house. He shuts the door and wedges a chair in front of it. Then he lights candle after candle and sticks each to the top of a night stand with drops of wax. He knows fire can't be trusted, but he's desperate for light.

There's a bed beside the night stand. It's neatly made and covered with a patchwork quilt. In the middle of the bed is a shoe box. Dan pushes it aside so he can sit down, then takes the lid off the box and looks inside. It's filled with snapshots, primarily of two girls. The younger one smiles a lot. Her front teeth are gone in some and back again in others. “Charlene,” someone has written on the back of one of the pictures. “Grade One.”

The older girl is beautiful. Innocent and exotic at the same time, like the girl next door, Dan thinks, if you lived on the Nile River. Her hair is long and blue-black. Her face the colour and shape of an almond. But the name on the back of her pictures isn't Cleopatra. It's Bee.

There are pictures of Virgil in the box as well — posing beside his boat, sometimes with the girls, sometimes with a variety of sunburned people. There's often a long string of fish between them.

And there is one picture of an older woman, grey hair cut short and business-like. She wears an apron and stands in front of a cook stove, scowling and brandishing a metal soup ladle over her head. Dan looks at her picture for a long time. He thinks he's seen her before.

There's no name written on the back of the photo so he searches the box for her face again and finds it in a snapshot at the very bottom. She's serving something from a huge bowl to a group of people seated at a plank table. Now he knows he recognizes her. And some of the other faces in the picture seem familiar. He's afraid if he goes on looking, he'll remember why.

He stuffs the pictures back into the box and replaces the lid. Then he shoves the box into a corner shelf and weighs it down with books he finds there. Even that doesn't stop him from hearing a voice calling to him from inside the box. “Useless! Useless!” He thinks it's the woman's voice he hears, although it may belong to the wind.

He crawls under the bed and covers his ears, but it's too late. Images fill his head. Sounds. Sensations. He sees himself on a dirt road. He's hurrying. Looking back over his shoulder. Then he begins to climb. He increases his pace until he's standing breathless on the edge of a cliff. He's frantic now, throwing pieces of himself away. His arms. His fingers.

Then he's back together again and he begins to run. Not too fast at first. He rests. He runs again. He feels good while he's running. He's accomplished something.

Then there's a jump in time — a dream jump, except this isn't what Dan would call a dream. There's smoke all around him now. Demons walk out of the smoke. “Get out of here,” they yell. “Out of here. Out of here.”

He begins to run, crashing through the underbrush. He falls. Gets up again. Pushes himself to increase his speed. Then suddenly he's moving in slow motion while everything breathes and sings around him — blades of grass. Dust. Weeds. Shafts of sunlight coming through the smoke. A raven with wings of black diamond soars above his head. “Fly,” it calls to him. The trees join in and the dense voices of rocks.

Dan spreads his arms and takes off out over the valley, wheeling and turning like burnt paper in the wind.

5
I K
NOW YOU

H
E HEARS FURNITURE MOVING DOWNSTAIRS AND
smells food. Someone knocks on the door. “Virgil?” he calls.

“No.” It's a high voice. And light. “You open the door this instant!” Something about the voice makes him feel it's safe to do that. He crawls out from under the bed and moves the chair away from the door. When he opens it a crack, he feels something whiz past him into the room.

“What are you doing here?” Charlene says. He knows it's Charlene. He's been looking at pictures of her for quite a while. She bends her elbows and rests her balled-up fists firmly on her hips. “You're supposed to come to the table. Where in the hell have you been?”

“Charlene!” The beautiful girl in the pictures comes to stand behind her. “Don't talk to him like that.”

“You're Bee, aren't you?” he says.

“Yes.” She raises her arms over her head and lowers them again. Every inch of progress they make leaves a line of gold in the air.

He follows the girls down the stairs and sits at the place they indicate. He's amazed at all the food on the table. There's a platter of fried ham. Another of hash browns. There are sliced tomatoes. A pitcher of orange juice. Hot cinnamon rolls. A whole sliced pineapple. Grapes. Kiwi fruit. Blueberries. Bananas. “It's morning then,” he says. “I didn't think it was.”

He takes the plate of food Bee offers him and begins to eat. Nothing has ever tasted this good before. He fills his mouth and chews but then can't swallow.