“How is she?” I said.
“Oh, Lynn,” Irina said. “I think the baby is sick.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Hey,” Wylie said sharply.
“Oh, come on,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of being on the same side of the fence as Gerald Lobachevski, but in this case I was. My voice seemed to boom in the empty mountain air. “When you have a baby, take care of it. I mean, if nothing else you should take care of your child.”
“Leave her alone,” Wylie said, grabbing me by the arm and shaking it, hard.
Irina sniffled — a sharp, anguished intake of breath — and I realized that I’d made her cry again. “I am always left out,” she said. “Not tonight.” She fumbled with the buttons on the front of her brown sack dress to offer her breast, but Psyche wouldn’t nurse. Then she began to rock the sling and pace back and forth across the road, constantly murmuring something, not quite words and not quite song, that sounded like “oh hasha hasha hasha oh.” Her voice filtered through the clear night, mournful as prayer and steady as grief. Wylie walked over to her and they leaned against the peeling, shadowy bark of a juniper tree. The baby’s cries were agonizing to hear. Wylie brushed some hair from Irina’s cheek, and Irina nodded at whatever he was whispering to her.
Angus came out, stepping lightly down the path, apparently having no problem whatsoever seeing where he was going, and again I was struck by how swiftly and easily he moved, seemingly unburdened by gravity or any other force. He put his hand on the small of my back. “We’re ready to go,” he said. “I want you to drive Irina and Psyche home.”
I nodded, but Irina stepped forward, and even in the dark I could see her flushed cheeks and wild eyes. “No,” she said. “I have come this far. I have been here for everything. I am not going to miss the most important action of the summer.”
“Irina, the baby,” I said.
“She is fine. She is fine.”
Angus smiled at her, gently. “The baby’s more important.”
She shook her head. “You always want to rid of me. It is like Lynn said before. I am always excluded from the boys’ club. You are like little boys playing in a fort in the wood.”
“Irina, be sensible.”
“Let her stay,” Wylie said, walking forward from the darkness. “If that’s what she wants.”
The two of them faced off again, my brother dark and scowling, Angus still smiling gently. I was starting to wonder if his smile was some sort of condition.
“We can’t have a crying baby in the middle of this,” Angus said. “I’m sorry, but that’s just common sense.”
Wylie sighed then, and I knew Angus and Gerald had won.
“I’ll drive them to the hospital,” I offered.
But when I turned the key, the Caprice gave a harsh, metallic rattle and wouldn’t turn over. I thought of how badly the car had been shuddering, and cursed myself for not having told Wylie about it earlier. He was sitting next to Irina in the back, the baby huddled between them, but I couldn’t see his face in the rearview mirror.
“Won’t start,” I said.
“I can hear that,” Wylie said immediately. “What have you been doing to my car?”
“Driving it.”
“Driving it how?”
“Wylie, it’s not my fault.”
“How can it not be?”
“This car is old. Old cars have problems. That’s just the way it goes.”
“This car will last indefinitely in an arid climate with proper maintenance.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You broke my car!”
“Look, there’s Gerald’s car,” I said. “We could borrow that.”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
Angus and the others were standing at the back of the van, conferring. I thought of all the tools and fluids and aerosol cans he had in there, even the BB gun, and wondered what they needed for whatever they were about to do.
“Listen, you two,” Irina said. “Listen.” The baby had stopped crying. “Psyche,” she said, “we can stay.”
In the end, we squeezed into the Plumbarama van with Angus, our hips and shoulders pressed together as we drove over the bumpy terrain. The smells of the desert breezed through the open windows, the clean, spicy scent of night-flowering plants, the funkier aroma of animals, the acrid trace of something burning in the distance. I sat between Angus and Irina, who was in Wylie’s lap, and Stan and Berto were in the back. I had no idea what time it was, but instead of sleepy I felt almost preternaturally alert, rested and ready, as if I’d been sleeping my entire life up till now. Psyche was quiet, finally, asleep in her mother’s arms, and Wylie glanced down at her constantly, checking on her condition. Gerald was behind us in his own car, accompanied only by the dog.
“Where are we going?” I asked Angus, but he didn’t answer.
The van jolted and shook over the dirt road, the headlights bouncing through the blackness. A strange kind of elation came over me, to be driving through the night away from the city and everything else; it was an almost religious feeling, tranquility and excitement in equal measure.
Angus rummaged around beneath his seat and then handed something to me. Holding it up to my face, I saw it was a roll of duct tape.
“Run some around your shoes and pass it around,” he said. “It disguises treads.”
I nodded, ripped off a silvery swatch, and handed the roll to Stan in the back, then looked at Wylie. “Where are we going?” I said.
He frowned. “Are you going to start complaining again?” “No,” I said, and it was true. “I just want to know what we’re doing.”
Angus grinned and said, “Hold on,” then swerved off to the right, from the dirt road to no road at all, as I bounced between him and Irina. He turned the lights off and drove straight across desert, dirt and rocks rattling beneath the wheels. After a few minutes he stopped and we climbed out, so far as I could tell, in the middle of nowhere. When my eyes adjusted, I saw Gerald and the dog getting out of the sedan and, overhead, thick, horizontal lines that stretched out and disappeared into the horizon. Power lines.
“This is so weird,” I said.
Wylie came up beside me. “Its beauty is in its simplicity. We don’t need bolt cutters or submersible pumps or tunnels. We just need a match.”
“You’re going to burn down the lines?”
“It’s not the fire that does it,” he said. “Smoke particles conduct electricity. They short-circuit one line, then the next line gets overloaded, then the next one, then the next. One domino falls against another until the whole city goes dark. It isn’t the fire that does it. It’s the smoke.”
“You’re starting a wilderness fire?” I said.
“Fire suppression’s an ill-advised program to begin with,” he said. “If we allowed natural fires to burn, the brush wouldn’t accumulate to the point where a wilderness fire is devastating.”
“But what if it spreads?” I said. “What about people?”
“It won’t,” he said firmly. “Trust me.”
Shadows walked ahead of me as I stood there noticing everything: the stalks of desert grasses swaying in the night wind; the howl of coyotes, plaintive and distant; the black ash of night and the pinpricks of stars. In front of me the shadows melted into darkness and I couldn’t see them anymore. I breathed in and out. I was alone.
Then Psyche started crying again, in real pain, it seemed to me. This is ridiculous, I thought, she needs to go to the hospital. I ran until I caught up with Irina, who was kneeling by a boulder and frantically shushing the baby. Psyche’s face was splotched and yellow, a shade skin should never have. She was coughing hard between her cries, her head pressed to Irina’s chest, and it sounded like she was throwing up. Then, ahead of us, sparks exploded into the night in a small, brilliant spray: the fire was set. The flames reminded me of the sparklers Wylie and I used to run around with on the Fourth of July, and there stole into my mind an image of my father leaning against the back of the house, a cocktail in one hand, watching us chase each other, his face lit by the flicker of a dwindling sparkler. My mother, inside in the kitchen, was shaking her head and watching us, too, from the window over the sink. Remembering this moment, the unbridled simplicity of the holiday, our backyard, our family, I felt unmistakably happy and then, just as unmistakably, terrible. Which was worse, I wondered: enduring the wash of loss over your life, or surviving long enough to feel its ebb? Wylie thought I stayed away so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of it, but this wasn’t true. I hadn’t come home so I wouldn’t have to recover.