by J L Bryan
The air grew increasingly hot, dry, and hard to breathe as we ascended a gradual slope through the woods. A constant rushing and roaring boomed ahead of us, like the sound of a waterfall; that was the wildfire, consuming its way through the mountains.
It was like a slow hike through an endless nightmare. I hate fire anyway, for obvious personal-history reasons, but I'd never experienced it quite like this. Ashes dribbled from the sky like rain, threatening to ignite the woods around us. At one point, a flock of birds flew over us, colliding and swerving chaotically through the air as they fled from the fire. I don't think I'd ever seen such a disorganized flock.
I was sweating hard by the time the land leveled out and we stepped through a broken wooden fence into the trailer park.
It was an eerily silent neighborhood, deserted in haste, kids' tricycles and toys scattered here and there in the weedy earth. We walked past one home after another, all of them quiet and glowing red in the light from the west.
“It feels like we just walked into a zombie apocalypse movie,” Michael said.
We reached an alleyway between two blocks of trailers, and suddenly we had a clear view of the fire.
It was even closer than I'd thought, filling the far side of a little canyon just beyond the trailer park. We could hear sirens in the distance. Firefighters had to be hard at work somewhere, but it wasn't here. There must have been other properties in town deemed more valuable and higher priority for the moment.
Many of the trailers had been touched up nicely, with little gardens and even window boxes.
Michael's father's trailer was not one of these. It sat near the back of the trailer park near the dumpsters, covered in a layer of dust, one window patched with plywood.
“Look at this truck,” Michael said, because of course he checked out his dad's truck first. It was the only vehicle that hadn't fled the trailer park, other than an old Iroc-Z up on concrete blocks a couple rows back. “Chevy S-10, with the Baja package.” Michael gestured at the roll bar with lights mounted atop it. “This thing's probably older than I am.”
“I guess he likes fixing up old machines, too,” I said.
“Not trailers, though.” Michael looked over the dusty windows. Stiff canvas curtains were drawn tight inside them. Suddenly, he appeared stricken, in a way he hadn't while hiking through the hot, smoky woods. Beyond the narrow, scratched trailer door waited, possibly, the father who'd abandoned him and his sister. The weight of it seemed to be hitting him.
“It'll be okay,” I said, kinda lamely, and reached out to take his hand.
“I never wanted to come here,” Michael said. “I never wanted to see him again.”
“I know,” I said. “You can handle this. You're strong.”
Michael half-smiled and shook his head. “I can get it over with, anyway.”
He took a breath, walked up the rickety wooden steps, and knocked on the trailer door.
Chapter Twenty-Four
We waited.
After a minute, Michael knocked again.
“Maybe he did leave,” Michael said. “Maybe he's got a different car. Or that truck doesn't work, and he caught a ride. Or walked.” He knocked again, then turned away when there was no response. “I guess we should get out of here. That fire looks like it's climbing this way.”
“Yeah—” I began, and then a flicker of movement caught the corner of my eye.
I turned to see one of the window curtains shifting back into place.
“What?” Michael asked.
“Someone's in there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Someone or something,” I said. “It could be an animal, maybe.”
Michael pounded his fist on the door several times, like he was there to serve an arrest warrant. “Open up! It's me, Michael.” He rattled the doorknob, but it was locked.
The curtain flickered again.
“That's it, I'm kicking the door in.” Michael grabbed the wobbly wooden railing for balance, drew back his foot, and stomped the sole of his shoe into the door, just below the handle.
The door gave way with a cracking sound, swinging inward to slam against an interior wall. Michael drew back and looked inside. He'd done all of this quickly, expertly; he'd been trained for it.
“I was coming to answer it,” said a gravelly voice from within the dim trailer. The only light was a dull red glow from the windows facing the wildfire.
The man who emerged from the reddish shadows didn't resemble Michael at all—at first. He looked like he hadn't shaved in a while, and there were a few stains on his faded green t-shirt, which featured the logo of the US Forest Service, which is apparently a fir tree flanked by a U and an S. The t-shirt barely fit over his flabby stomach. He was graying, balding, and he stood a little off-center. I realized his left leg was a prosthetic, really not much more than a rod.
He wiggled the door back and forth, inspecting the damage. “Looks like you took out her lock and the top hinge,” he said, his voice showing little emotion as he inspected the damage. He kept looking over the broken lock, and after a minute I realized he was doing that to avoid looking directly at Michael.
“Do you know who I am?” Michael finally asked.
The man's eyes finally shifted to Michael, and suddenly I saw the family resemblance, the intense bright green eyes, the once-handsome face under jowls and chins and stubble. For a moment it was like looking at a future version of Michael, one who'd lived hard and without much regard for his own health.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess this is the week all my bad karma catches up to me.” He looked out the window at the approaching fire in the canyon.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked.
“Your sister was here.” Brent Holly looked over his son. “You're both so grown up. Adults now.”
“Yeah, we managed fine without you,” Michael said. “Where is she?”
“Melissa left last night. She spent the night on the couch, night before that.”
“Where did she go?” Michael asked.
“She didn't tell me. I guess I figured she'd gone back home.”
“Is that what she said?”
“No. She didn't say, that's just what I thought.” Brent turned and walked deeper into his trailer. “You want a beer?”
“No, thanks.” Michael followed him in, and I trailed behind.
I started to close the door behind me, but then I noticed the smell—stale cigarettes, almost drowned out by a fresh cigarette burning in an aluminum ashtray. Brent picked it up and took a long drag, and I decided to leave the door open. The outside smelled smoky, too, but not so sour.
The interior of the trailer pretty well matched the outside—sagging couch, nicotine-yellow walls, old TV set up on cinderblocks. An old plastic shower curtain at one end blocked off most of his bed, but not all of it. There was no sheet on the few inches of mattress I could see.
“So you left us for all this,” Michael said, looking around. “A life of excitement and adventure in California. Fancy.” He stepped closer to some photographs Scotch-taped to the wall. They showed a younger, happier version of Brent, along with a few other smiling guys, in Kevlar smokejumper outfits and parachute packs, ready to take on the world, or at least defend it from wildfires.
“Had a bad landing. Real bad.” Brent tapped the metal rod that substituted for his lower leg. “Couldn't do the job after that.”
“Sad stuff,” Michael said, flatly, as if to make it clear how little he cared. “So now you sit here drinking beer and thinking back on your wreck of a life.”
“More or less.” Brent squinted painfully as he sank onto the couch. “My wreck of a life. That's a pretty good way of putting it. I guess you and Melissa had plenty of time to work this out. I'm surprised to see you up here, though.” He gestured out the window, at the wildfire creeping ever closer. “You should get out. It's dangerous. Whole place has been evacuated.”
“But you're still here.”
�
��I am.” Brent looked out the window at the ever-approaching red glow. “Your sister had a lot to say to me.”
“Like what?”
“She spent a good amount of time on that couch, telling me I should die.”
“What?” Michael glanced at me, but I had no special insight for him.
“She told me to kill myself,” Michael's dad continued. “She made a good case for it. Her idea was that I should shoot myself in the head. I don't own a gun right now, though. It's not like I have anything here to protect, or anyone.” He paused to draw on his cigarette, its crackling sound reminding me of the constant whooshing of the forest fire.
“So she seemed angry with you?” I asked.
“She seemed calm. Her anger had cooled into something hard and sharp. Like iron. Shaped by heat, but cold now. She said the only way I could start to make things up to her, the only way she could really move on and maybe have a happy life ahead, is if she knew I was dead. She said I needed to make that happen or she'd never be able to move on.”
Michael looked stunned. He'd clearly had a pile of negative things to say to his father, but I doubt it would have occurred to him to go that far.
“She really said that?” Michael asked.
“Her version was longer. Went on for hours,” his father replied. “And you might say she caught me at the right time for it. I've thought about it before. She told me I had to do it for her. And for you.”
Michael was silent for a minute. “That's some Hannibal Lecter stuff right there,” he eventually said, very quietly.
“When exactly did she arrive?” I asked.
“Yesterday.” Michael's father squinted and shook his head. “Day before yesterday. Today's...what? The thirty-first? New Year's Eve? Anyway, she stayed one night, left yesterday.”
“So she changed her mind about wanting you to die?” Michael asked.
“No,” he said. “Like I said, I don't have a gun here. But the wildfire started up, sometime during that night when she stayed here. She said the fire was a better way for me to die, anyway.”
“Do you think she started it?” I asked.
“I don't want to accuse her of anything,” Brent said. “I guess she could have slipped out during the night if she wanted to. But we've had worse and worse fires every year. It used to be the fires stopped during the winters, but now it's all year long. There's nothing unusual about one more, even if it is in January.” He ground out his cigarette, heaved himself from the couch, and looked out the nearest red-glowing window. “She's hopped the gully.”
I looked out another window. Runners of fire approached the trailer park, climbing the slope below like wild animals chewing their way through the dry weeds and shrubs. Panic started to scale its way up from deep in the pit of my stomach, and I struggled to fight it down.
“I realize I'm not one of the fire experts here,” I said, “but it looks to me like things are getting a just a tad life-threatening out there. We should maybe get going.”
“You both should go,” Brent said. “It's only a matter of time now.”
“What about you?” Michael asked him. “You plan to just stay here and let the wildfire take you?”
Brent was quiet for a long moment, made longer by the approaching flames. Weeds were burning just a few yards away, and a lake of fire waited beyond to follow the little runners up to the trailer and engulf it.
“People think they know fire,” he said, finally. “They treat it like a pet, roasting marshmallows in a fireplace, or around a controlled little circle of a campfire. Most people today have never seen what fire can be, once it starts to feed and grow. She becomes a monster, a giant, a demon that wants to eat the world.”
“I'm not sure any of us should be doing a big monologue right now,” I said, watching the fire swell ever closer.
“That's my fate,” Brent said. “It's the big wheel turning back to crush me for my sins.”
“Big wheel?” Michael asked. “Like in the...Journey song?”
“That's 'Wheel in the Sky,'” Brent said.
“If it's in the sky and you can see it, then it's probably pretty big,” Michael said.
“Or maybe it's just very low in the sky,” Brent said. “Anyway, I'm talking about karma here. I'm talking about the harm I've done to you, and to your sister, and to your mother. And to other people, things you don't know about. The karmic wheel is spring-loaded. The more you push it in one direction, the more power you're giving it to spin back, to crush you under its weight. It all comes back to you.”
“Seriously, guys, this fire is not slowing down,” I said. “Can we go already?”
“Yeah, I don't remember you blabbing on about karma and the wheels of fate when I was growing up. California has changed you.”
“Maybe. I did spend a couple of months living on a vegan commune.”
“That doesn't sound like you,” Michael said. “Whatever happened to 'Grillmaster Brent'? I mean, obviously he ran off and abandoned his family. But I never thought you'd abandon ribs and burgers.”
“It was mostly because of a girl I was seeing.”
“Okay, that's more believable. I guess you did have a lot of time to date, without a wife and kids dragging you down.”
Brent nodded, watching the fire stream uphill. The glow reflected bright and red in his eyes, as though his soul had turned to fire.
“I didn't leave because I wanted to abandon you,” he said. “I left because I felt like I didn't belong there. I felt like there was more to life. That I was meant to do something else.”
“Well, you did abandon us, no matter what you want to call it,” Michael said.
It was getting hot in there, and the flames leaped up outside the windows, hungry to devour us and anything else in its path.
“Guys!” I snapped.
“I always meant to come back,” Brent said, very quietly, his whole face flickering red as he stared out at the fire, dark shadows across his eyes and face lending him an almost demonic look.
It's Anton Clay, I thought, suddenly. He's jumped from Melissa's body to Brent's, and he's been waiting here to kill us both. And we still haven't heard from Melissa, so she must be—
“I was going to have my life out here for a while, then go back,” Brent said. “At least, I thought about going back. I thought about you a lot, Mikey.”
“Don't call me that.”
“You were my little sidekick.”
“Don't call me that, either.”
“You remember the year we dressed as Batman and Robin for Halloween? You wanted to be Batman, so I had to dress like Robin.”
“Yeah, that was a long time ago. I was like seven.”
“Six,” Brent said. “And you were so happy about it. Wouldn't stop talking about it for months.”
“I guess I was easily impressed back then,” Michael said.
“You were. It's hard to believe you're that same smiley little guy. That's how I still see you, when I think of you.”
“Of course it is. You haven't seen me since.”
Brent sighed. “You're right. Your sister has already cut me to pieces over it, and she was right, too. That's why I'm still here. That's why you should go and leave me to burn.” He sank again to the couch, the one that was likely to be consumed in the approaching flames. “If the fire doesn't come in, I'll go out there to meet her. It's the way I'm meant to go. And now it's time.”
Michael stood there, looking at his father. The struggle was evident on his face—saving people was what Michael did, but here was the person he hated most in the world, choosing to die in the fire.
“Come on, this is crazy,” I said. I was sweating now; roasting heat was pushing its way in through the windows, and it felt like the breathable air was getting sucked out to feed the flames.
“It's crazy for the two of you to stay here.” Brent lit another cigarette. I guess when you've decided to die sometime in the next few minutes, you don't worry about long-term issues like lung cancer and celluli
te. He should have been eating a pile of sweets along with his chain-smoking, really. Like Willmore at the end of his life.
“Y'all are both crazy,” I said, which I felt was pretty self-evident at this point. “Let's head down to the fairground like everyone else. Maybe they'll open up the deep-fried Snickers booth.”
Michael looked between us, then sighed. “Come on, Dad,” he said. “Let's get moving.”
“My mind's made up,” Brent said. “This has been a long time coming. I want you to go, Michael. I want you to go on and have your life. And I'm ready for mine to end. I just want to be out of pain.”
“Okay,” Michael said, sounding resigned. “I guess that settles it.”
“Seriously?” I asked. I can't say I was ready to shed any tears for Brent himself, but there was Michael to think about. If he left his father to burn when he could have saved him, that would weigh on him the rest of his life. This was something I had some familiarity with. And while my parents weren't estranged from me when they died, our last interaction was a big fight. A big, stupid fight over a little concert they didn't want me to attend and a boy they didn't particularly want me to date.
I was starting to doubt my earlier suspicion that Michael's father was possessed by Clay, though. He just seemed like a broken middle-aged man. Clay would have been truculent and triumphant to have me trapped in this situation, on the verge of frying to death in a metal box that was about to grow oven-hot.
“Yeah, I'm serious,” Michael said, glancing at me before looking back at his dad. “If dying here, like this, is what you really want...then there's no way I'm going to let you have it.”
“What?” Brent look startled. “But your sister—”
“My sister's possessed by a mass-murdering ghost right now,” Michael said. Flames were dancing outside the trailer windows now. One of the panes cracked from the heat, making us all jump. “And I'm only here because I'm searching for her. Her trail brought us here. You want me to leave you alone to die? Tell me where she went and I'll consider it.”