‘Maybe that’s not right,’ I said. And I thought that because I didn’t see what any of this had to do with my father.
‘Maybe not,’ my mother said, ‘maybe you’re smart and I’m stupid.’
‘Do you like Miller?’ I said. I had wanted to know it in the afternoon, but there hadn’t seemed enough reason to ask, whereas now for some reason there did.
‘Do you mean Mr Miller? Warren?’ my mother said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you like him?’
‘Not very much,’ she said. ‘Things do happen around him, though. He has that feel about him, doesn’t he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had the knife he had given me in my pocket, a thing he had given me to make me like him. But that was all that had happened to me where Warren Miller was concerned.
‘He’s going to give me a job to keep his books at his grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘That’s something. And he’s asked you and me to have supper at his house tomorrow night. Which is lucky because I had plans to open up some cans. Why?’
‘I was interested,’ I said. The truth was I wanted to know what she thought about my father leaving, and I hoped this would get around to that subject. Though it didn’t, and I didn’t know how to make it.
‘It’s always just yourself,’ my mother said. ‘Nothing else.’
‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘Honey, nothing. I was thinking and talking. It’s a bad habit. You have an inquiring intelligence. Everything will always surprise you. You’ll have a wonderful life.’ She smiled.
‘Don’t they surprise you?’
‘Not much,’ my mother said. ‘Now and then I run upon the unexpected. But that’s all. Look up there now, Joe.’
Ahead of us at the end of the canyon, the creek bottom road opened into a wide grass meadow beyond which a hill went up sharply, full of small fires in sparse trees.
‘Let’s give you the full treatment,’ my mother said, and she stopped the car right there, still in the narrow canyon where there were patches of fire burning ten yards from the road. She turned off the motor. ‘Open your door,’ she said. ‘See what it feels like.’
I opened my side and stepped out on the road just as she’d told me to. And the fire was all around me, up the hill on both sides and in front of me and behind. The small yellow fires and lines of fire were flickering in the underbrush close enough that I could’ve touched them just by reaching out. There was a sound like wind blowing, and a crack of limbs on fire. I could feel the heat of it all over the front of me, on my legs and my fingers. I smelled the deep, hot piny odor of trees and ground in flames. And what I wanted to do was get away from it before it overcame me.
I got back in the car with my mother and closed the door. It was instantly cooler and quieter.
‘How was that?’ she said, and looked at me.
‘It’s loud,’ I said. My hands and legs still felt hot.
‘Did it appeal to you?’ my mother said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it scared me.’ And that is the feeling I’d had when it was all around me.
‘It’s just a lot of small fires that once in a while blow together. Don’t be afraid now,’ my mother said. ‘You just needed to see what your father finds so entrancing. Do you understand it?’
‘No,’ I said, and I thought my father might’ve been surprised by such a fire and want to come home.
‘I don’t understand either,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not mysterious at all.’
‘Maybe he was surprised,’ I said.
‘I’m sure he was,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry we both can’t sympathize with him.’ She started the car and drove us on.
In the meadow was a tent camp where there were trucks and temporary lights strung on lines between wooden poles. Fires were beside the road. Small ones. People were moving inside the camp — mostly men, I thought, brought there to fight the fire. Some I could see lying on cots inside tents that had their flaps left open. Some were standing and talking. Others were sitting in trucks. A small dark airplane with a white star on its tail section was sitting farther out in the meadow. Straight across the road that we were on and still ahead of us was a small service station where more trucks were, and a white-lighted CAFE sign hung out in the early evening darkness. We passed a sign that said that this was Truly, Montana, though it was hard to tell what made it a town. It only seemed to be a separate place because all around it a fire was burning.
‘This is quite a place,’ my mother said, watching out the windshield as we drove into the little town of Truly. She motioned toward the tent camp. ‘That’s the stage-up over there,’ she said, ‘where everyone leaves and comes back. It’s just smoke all the time up here. You’re never out of it.’
‘Do you think we can drive in and find Dad?’
‘No we can’t,’ my mother said abruptly. ‘He’s fresh out. They’ll keep him up there till he drops. Then he’ll come down, if he’s alive enough. I’m not going to look for him. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes,’ I said. But I was watching the hillside and only half listening. I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside — a wind that did not blow where we were — changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there in the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was a thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would. Though I didn’t understand why my father would risk danger, unless it was that he didn’t care about life much, or unless there was something in losing it that was satisfying, which didn’t seem like anything I remembered anybody ever having said to me.
In the cafe we sat in a booth by the window so we could both see across the road to the fire camp and the fire itself, which turned the sky red above the ridge lines so that you knew that beyond where you could see there was more fire and men fighting it.
My mother ordered fried chicken for both of us, and as we sat waiting, a truck stopped in front of the cafe, and fifteen or so men got off the back of it, wearing heavy canvas clothing and boots, their faces blackened with fire soot, and moving as if they were stiff and tired. The men were all big men with heavy gaits and they all came inside the cafe together and sat at four of the tables without talking. The two women who were the waitresses went around the tables asking if the men wanted what they usually had — fried steaks and potatoes — and they all said yes, then sat drinking their water and talking softly while they waited. They were young men — older than I was, but still young. And there was a smell that came from them and went all through the room. The smell of cold ashes, a smell that came right out of their clothes and stayed in the air, as if the men had just walked right out of the fire itself and had been burned by it and this was what was left of them.
My mother had glanced at the men when they sat down, then looked back out the window at the lighted stage camp beyond our car, and up onto the ridge and hillside which was on fire in small blazes like campfires. She ordered a can of beer and drank it out of the can as she stared out.
‘I think it’s just because he lost his job,’ she said. When she said that she looked at the men who were at the tables across the room. ‘It made him go crazy. I feel sorry for him. I actually do.’ She looked back out the window into the night.