He read about fires in Canada and Siberia that might not burn out until they had exhausted their tinder. He knew about rising temperatures, thawing permafrost, and melting ice caps. And Montana was so dry that the Forest Service fire-danger signs seemed permanently set at VERY HIGH and EXTREME. He wondered whether there came a time when the old rules ceased to apply.
Reaching the Y, he jogged a circle in the road, his trainers puffing dust as fine and arid as Martian soil, and turned back. Most of the road was monotonously straight, but a curve and a drop here, combined with the robust fringe of knapweed on the bank, made it a blind corner for cars coming up from behind.
Sidd heard gravel popping under the truck’s tires before he heard its engine, a throaty V8. He stumbled into the weeds and pressed himself against the bank.
The black truck pulled up next to him, its window down. The driver leaned forward and shouted across a gray-bearded man in the passenger seat who was concentrating on something in his lap. “Wear some lighter clothes, asshole!” The man had mirrored, wraparound sunglasses resting on the bill of his baseball cap.
Sidd looked down at what he was wearing. Navy T-shirt, black shorts, blue running shoes. Should he apologize?
“I’m trying to save your goddamn life!” The man gunned the engine and the truck sprayed gravel and surged forward. A pebble stung Sidd’s shin like a wasp.
It wasn’t until the white GMC on the truck’s tailgate had disappeared around the bend that Sidd started running again, shakily, wondering whether the man would have said anything about his clothes if his skin hadn’t been dark as well.
Poe pounded the wheel. “Swear to fucking God, you could pack into the Bob Marshall and some fucking jogger would still run through your camp in his underwear.”
“That was stupid,” said Mike, barely looking up from the glowing rectangle in the palm of his massive left hand.
“Woulda been more stupid if we came back with him stuck in the grille.”
“Maybe better that way.”
Thing was, Mike was right. It was stupid. Yell at some guy, he was that much more likely to remember seeing your truck. Poe had been trying not to lose his shit so easily lately, but no sooner had he promised himself he’d be Clint Eastwood — quiet than he was ragging on someone again.
Mike poked at the screen, calm as ever. Even when he said, That was stupid, it was like he was saying, Pull over at the next gas station. And if anyone had a right to be pissed at the world, it was Mike. Poor son of a bitch had only been out of Deer Lodge for a couple of months and it must have been like landing on an alien planet. He was so 1980s he still wore a fanny pack.
He’d also never seen a smartphone except on TV and now he couldn’t stop playing the game Poe’s daughter had downloaded for him. Poe had been around enough addicts not to fall for the free first taste, but Mike was hooked on Candy Crush crack.
Poe needed an extra set of hands and figured that Mike, who was still on parole, had plenty of incentive to keep his mouth shut about the job. That, and he was Poe’s cousin’s ex-husband and she’d been all over Poe to help Mike out. She needed money, so Mike needed money.
A low voice said, “Sweet!” as the big man took out a row of jellybeans or something.
“How’s the game going?” Poe asked. “You win yet?”
“I think this is made for little kids’ fingers,” Mike said without looking up.
“Think you’ll be able to take a break in a minute? We’re almost there.”
Mike nodded but kept playing. Good thing he wasn’t behind the wheel. Poe was sure they didn’t teach inmates about the dangers of distracted driving. He held the wheel carefully as the road went steadily up.
Poe wasn’t a firebug by nature, but his first job, a foreclosed lumber warehouse, had been a career-maker. Though he’d torched a lot of things since then, this was his first ski resort. Well, it wasn’t a ski resort yet, and if he did his job right, it wouldn’t be.
The thing had been going on for years. Poe had seen headlines in the Missoulian a couple of times. Awhile back, Betty Jean Allaway, whose family had ranched the western half of the valley for almost 150 years, had surprised the shit out of everyone by marrying Bucky Severson, her ranch manager. Betty Jean was older than Bucky and didn’t have any kids. When she died, Bucky inherited the whole spread and got it in his head that he was going to build a ski resort on the part that covered the north side of Lolo Peak — and not just any ski resort, but the biggest one in North America.
With the way society was going, you couldn’t put up a fireworks tent without a shit ton of paperwork. Even Poe knew a ski resort was bound to be a ten-year project at least. But Bucky being Bucky, he went and bulldozed the ski runs anyway to get a jump-start. Maybe he figured that once people saw the potential, they’d say, What the hell, you might as well finish.
They didn’t. Once the environmentalists got involved, the whole thing was doomed. Bucky didn’t see it, so he lawyered up and got ready to fight to the bitter end. But apparently the developers he’d partnered with foresaw a different outcome. Because they were the ones who’d sent someone to find someone to burn the whole thing down a week before the Montana Supreme Court reached its bound-to-be-unfavorable decision.
Poe had no proof he was working for WashIdaMont Development Partners. As far as he knew, he was working for the guy who’d slipped him $2,500 in worn bills behind Lucky Lil’s Casino. But there had to be insurance money, money that might not be on the table once the project was officially declared unviable. That’s how things worked, right? What they were paying Poe — half down, half on completion — probably came out of the coffee fund. And Mike? Mike was more than happy to take home five hundred dollars for a morning’s work. Given that his ex-wife had laid claim to the forty cents an hour he’d earned working in the prison bakery, it was the most money he’d seen at one time in twenty-seven years.
Reaching the first switchback, Poe turned the wheel and geared down. The truck climbed into the trees.
Siddharth Ghosh was an unlikely caretaker. But the world itself was unlikely — how else could he account for the fact that he was living in a trailer on a mountain in Montana, halfway around the world from where he’d grown up?
As a child, he’d felt perfectly at home in Mumbai. The heat, the rain, and the crowds were mundane obstacles his family navigated with good-humored exasperation. Even the city’s uneasy relationship with the sea and the saltwater that flooded the sewers at high tide seemed part of a natural pattern of ebb and flow.
Then came July 26, 2005. When the skies opened, it felt as though there had been another ocean hiding in the clouds. Rain fell so hard and so fast that Sidd, watching schoolmates make desperate dashes to their waiting parents, imagined it might be possible to drown on two feet.
Twelve years old, Sidd himself remained stuck at school overnight, unable to go home once the trains stopped moving. In the dark, he sat with his English teacher and listened to the news reports on a battery-powered radio barely audible over the water battering the roof.
Sidd’s father reached him late the following afternoon on an army truck with giant wheels. He brought bad news: Aunt Janani, his mother’s beloved sister, had drowned in her car, unable to open her doors against the rising water.
His family mourned but seemed to recover. Sidd could not. From that day, he lived in Mumbai as if under siege. The jostling crowds frightened him. The sea became an enemy. Monsoon season brought with it unrelenting anxiety, the wet air and mold seeming to foretell a watery doom. A teenage recluse, Sidd paged obsessively through his late aunt’s collection of National Geographic, an American magazine to which she had been peculiarly devoted. From the May 1976 issue, he cut out a picture of a snowcapped mountain in Montana. It seemed dry, cold, and tranquil — everything Mumbai was not.