by Robert Chafe
Roger looked up at them, the pair of faces comical in their shared expression, the same haircut. They were waiting for him to say something and the longer he delayed the more he reinforced their concern.
“Lesbians,” Roger said, like he was price-tagging them for sale. The women blinked this in, but didn’t answer back.
“I’m fine, I live two blocks down, and I am just taking my dogs for a walk.”
“The town has been evacuated, sir. There is nobody else here.”
“You’re here,” Roger said, and waited for them to deny it.
The woman on the passenger side cracked her door, twisted in the seat and put her feet on the ground. The dogs ran to her in an instant, Wanda jumping clear into her lap.
“We were going to wait it out,” the driver said. “We thought we could.”
“You thought we could,” her passenger corrected her, Wanda licking her face. “We changed our minds. It’s becoming too dangerous, sir.”
The driver shifted the car into park, opened her own door and stood with her hands on the bonnet looking at him.
“Are you alone?”
“Come on, Wanda, come down out of that.”
“She’s ok, aren’t ya girl.”
The driver wafted her hand across her face and screwed up her nose and did everything possible to make a deal about the smoke, to remind them all it was there. Roger took a deep breath to spite her, held it for a second.
“Are you alone, sir, is there anything we can do to help?”
Wanda was getting a belly rub, and was all but comatose, on her back with tongue hanging. Carm and Boat were at the passenger’s feet waiting their turn. Roger didn’t like that the dogs were being used as pawns. The passenger lesbian was scratching Wanda in a way that drew a guttural moan he’d never heard before. He gave the leashes a good yank but the dogs wouldn’t heed him.
“Did they come to your door, sir, the officials, did they tell you about the danger.”
“No fire that I can see.”
The driver lesbian then spouted on about air quality, and the danger as it already existed, and when Roger wouldn’t offer her eye contact she started in about wind velocity and the forecast and the top travel speed of a fire backed by the weather.
“Come, Wanda, come.”
“We don’t have much room in the car, but we could certainly call for help, send someone back for you.”
Roger wanted his dogs back, and he wanted to go home. He pulled again on the leash, perhaps too hard and the three dogs skidded towards him, Wanda pitched off the passenger’s lap and onto the ground. He wanted to go to Wanda and apologize and make sure she was all right but to do so would be weak and would show remorse and here with these women and their insistence it was important to stand firm. Wanda rolled to her feet and waddled to his side. The passenger lesbian looked offended and angry and seemed to think Roger was something new now, something ugly and not worth their time. She slammed her door.
“Let’s go.”
“What’s your name, sir? Can we send someone for you?”
“Let’s go, Julie!”
Roger began walking away from them, felt the driver’s eyes digging into his back and heard the passenger stabbing her with her own name: “Julie!” The driver’s door eventually closed and the car sped past him into the haze and away. Roger cut his walk short and started for the house. They won’t last long, he thought to himself. Those women, their relationship. It won’t last long.
For almost two years he’d done everything in his power to prove himself to her. Laura had deviated into moments of silence before, but he had warded off his doubts by intensifying his efforts. He’d bought her a ring that second Christmas, saw her dissatisfaction with him almost melt, but then she’d said she wasn’t ready. He told her he’d ask again, and she’d conceded to the possibility. She called him one afternoon at his parents’, and asked to meet at the diner where they had gone on their second date. Her voice sounded so much more tired, but he found in it that note of potential. He showered, dressed in his best, put more effort into his appearance than he had ever done for her before.
He offered to buy her coffee and knew he was in trouble when she declined. The back of her chair was against the wall, and the back of his was against the person behind him, the table cutting into their ribs, their feet on its circular base to keep it steady on the heaving floor. The diner had been an old barber shop, mirrors down one full wall. He saw them both reflected back and had a fleeting and visceral memory of their early days, her face looking up into his, his hands on her body. He wanted to reach across the tippy table and touch her, felt for certain that would make everything all right. She had her coat on, and sat on her fingers like she might be cold and she said what she had to say. She left him then, alone with half a cup of coffee. His mug was still hot, that’s how long it took.
He didn’t understand what had happened, and without an adequate explanation he chocked it up to her nerves and indecision and saw it as something erratic, something that given time would right itself. In the days and weeks afterwards, he mourned it the way you’d mourn a rained-out party, a postponement.
He stopped his work on the house, already progressed to the point of needing her input on décor, and he set into waiting her out. But what started as patience and misplaced compassion, turned into full-bodied anger, fuelled by his own stubbornness as the months dragged on. Finishing the house would be acknowledging defeat, and so he never finished it. He let it sit as a testament to his love, and then his stamina, and then his pride. He eventually moved himself in, furnished it as much as necessary. She was a ghost for a long time, the house and its stasis was all about her. But then his body eventually reminded him of time and its passage and of more important things. The shell of the house became more about qualities he possessed that, depending on the day, were to be admired or pitied. He was sixty-eight years old now. In the forty-five years since he’d last seen Laura he’d never been with another woman.
He was thinking about buildings, and how man-made things that were abandoned eventually were reclaimed by nature: plants and insects, birds and their nests. He had once watched a TV documentary that gave a city a year or two before its impenetrable structures would crumble and collapse with rot. He wondered how long it would be before the wild would eat through his vinyl siding and he offered a few numbers out loud to the dogs. He was walking Boat, Carm, and Wanda. It was pushing midnight, and the dogs were taking longer than usual, sniffing everything within their reach, pulling hard collectively on his arm and making him work even more for his breath. He eventually gave in and let them explore the hedges of the corner lot at the top of the street while he stood leaning against the concrete garbage bin, thinking.
He saw it across the top of the hill then. What had settled in the previous days into an ever-present and pulsing under-light against the smoke-fed clouds had finally crested the ridge. The fireman who had come to his door had told him the blaze was within sixty miles of the town’s outer limits. That had been almost a week ago. Now the black of the treed hill against the night sky was cut with an orange scar, the upper bowl of the valley like an edge of smoldering paper. He stood and stared at the distant wall of fire, watched for its progress forward, just this side of perceptible: the minute hand of a clock or the rise of a bright moon. It was beautiful in its way, but all the same he felt the insatiable urge to run back to the house. He said the dogs’ names in turn and began to tug on their leashes.
The sky started dropping soft pockets of light and heat, a shower of embers drifting and tumbling, dancing harmlessly through the upper branches of trees, rolling down the shingled black roofs and settling in the cool grass of the uncut lawns. These, the first wave, were taking their last breaths into darkness, but Roger looked up into the great billowing black above him, and saw more and more drops of fire that would surely not succumb so easily. Boat made a wet cough, and when Roger looked the little dog was lying down, struggling for breath against
the thick wooden wind and it was only then that Roger felt his own lungs heave. He tugged on the leash but despite the action of the two younger dogs who seemed to understand the urgency and circle and chase with it, Boat just sat, nose on the ground. Roger cursed the dog, let loose with his anger and walked away until he was two lots down and he had exhausted the rolled-out length of his retractable leash. Roger looked back at Boat, still lying where he had left him, his charcoal eyes seeming to glint with the light of the distant fire. Boat began to bark then, still sitting but with a line of alarm along his spine. The little dog was looking past Roger and the girls, at something in the gloom of the street towards their house.
The bear stood in the middle of the road, its black fur steaming, its jaw dripping frothed drool. The animal stared at Roger from ten paces, wheezing with exhaustion. With the fire at its back it must have made its escape down into the valley and now within a maze of concrete roads and banana-coloured siding the animal was disoriented, tired, hungry, and afraid. The bear extended its neck, its wet eyes to the sky and took deep sniffs that seemed to tell it little with all of the smoke in the air. It grunted and took a half-step back, lowered its nose again and examined Roger more closely with its eyes instead.
Roger had only seen a bear once before, in his youth, from the safety of his father’s car. It was on the side of the dirt road, the rumble of the tires on the gravel not enough to scare it off. Roger had watched the bear through the back window, staring at him from the cloud of dust the car had kicked up, sitting on its haunches, receding in the distance, almost tame and fantastical, a picture book come to life. That bear hadn’t looked dangerous, and so Roger had never thought of them as so growing up. He was surprised to feel what he was feeling in this moment, the panic, the real threat suddenly so physical and close he could smell it over the smoke: wet fur and sweat.
The bear swung its head in big circles, looking for an uncontaminated breath of air. At Roger’s feet, Carm and Wanda began to growl, and then bark, and then Roger had all three dogs seemingly intent on getting him killed. He tugged their leashes, and the noise of it stirred something in the bear and the animal stopped swinging its head and stared at him. Everything in him that made sense told Roger to run, to drop the leashes and head for the darkness of the hedges along the street. But he didn’t.
The bear made a howl and took to a run, claws clacking on the asphalt. It was coming straight for him, and Roger could do nothing but stand his ground, his knuckles still a white grip on the leashes. But the bear made a sudden swing out and around Roger and the girls, and once past them it cut its course straight again, back along the centre line of the road and headed straight for Boat. The little dog was on its feet and trying to run in the opposite direction but Roger’s leash had no more to give, and now that he had resigned himself to holding it, Roger never thought to drop it, to let Boat go and make his own break for it. Boat began with a shrill cry, a yelp of uncensored terror as the bear bore down on him and Roger could only say the dog’s name and bounce on his legs like a tired toddler, and watch what was happening helpless. And then with no warning it bore out of Roger, hot as a poker and burning his throat, this scream, this bellow, and the bear skidded to a halt, startled, and stood on the road there between him and Boat, its great head swinging in indecision. The dog barked, and so did Roger. He called the bear names, unnamable filth, words he’d heard young people use in the playgrounds after dark. Spit was on his chin, and he was walking toward them now, the bear and Boat. He looked for something to throw and saw nothing, but came forward anyway, and the bear grunted and made a small charge at him. Roger screamed again, put his arms over his head, clear lifted Carm and Wanda off their feet with their shortened leashes. He told it to come, he dared it, cursed again, and the bear considered it, grunting and swearing in its own way. And then Roger lowered his arms and stared at the thing. He stared and sent it all of his anger and hatred and he saw it cower under the silent weight of it, the forty-five years of misery, and the bear thought to charge again, and thought, and then didn’t.
It sat down a moment on its haunches. And Roger took a step back, pulled the girls closer to him, the full truth of what his fear had made him do suddenly coming into full and sharp relief. He laboured with his breath, and so did the bear until suddenly it had its breath again. It turned then and bolted away and with no set plan or considered route it ran right over Boat, the kick of its great furred paws flying the little dog like a scrap of paper under a car. And then it was gone down the road, following the yellow line into the darkness, away from the mountain of fire and the sparks it was kicking up.
The slow roll of the night took Roger home instead of elsewhere. The town, and its reaches to the west, were completely black. His tiny porchlight burning on its own. There was nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. He was lying in bed, the dogs under the covers with him. Boat was still shaking, the girls already snoring and oblivious. Roger was wide awake, but with his eyes closed against the surreal glow of the approaching fire through the sheer bedroom curtains. He reflected on the parts of the house he’d miss the most. He thought about Laura for the first time in a while. He tried to remember what he loved about her, what he had fallen in love with. He surely could have been just as happy with someone else. How could it be that he was willing to stare down a bear for Boat but he had never attempted the simplest braveries with another person?
He heard a noise outside the house and readied himself for the heat of the strange light to burn its way through the bare walls. But after minutes of the sound getting louder and closer, Roger eventually threw off the covers and rolled away from Boat to go to the window. The murk of smoke outside was being cut by something sharp, a flicker of red against the flat walls of the houses up the street. Fire engines began to roll down his block, and stopped next to the hydrant three doors away. Firemen scrambled into action, hoses extracted, the hydrant unleashed. They were barely recognizable as men: every inch of skin covered, their faces steamed behind blast shields and oxygen masks. They trained their hoses on the roofs of the houses across the road and began spraying them down against the falling fires to be. Roger left the bedroom to head downstairs, calling the dogs to him as an afterthought. Halfway down he heard a rumble, parts of the house shaking that had never been touched before, something new after so many years of nothing but old. He turned the corner past the kitchen and realized the rumble was the water from their hoses. It was running roughshod over the siding of his house and gushing down the windows, the red flash of the trucks broken and bent in the runoff and mottled against the living-room walls.
Roger opened the front door, held his hand out to the stream of red drops raining from his eaves. Carm and Wanda made a break for the cool wet grass of the lawn. It was Carm’s barking that alerted the firemen. One of them sent a broad signal to another, his hand slicing the air in front of his face and the water stopped and the hose deflated. The fireman began walking towards Roger, fighting with his facemask, his fingers fat and uncooperative in his gloves. Roger headed back into the open porch to get a sensible pair of shoes. He picked Boat up on his way, grabbed the leashes and some poop bags.
He expected the fireman to be annoyed with him. So many people had been over the years. But the young man took the dog in one arm and held Roger’s elbow with the other, guided him over the wet sidewalk, around the large puddles in the street. It made Roger feel even older to be walked this way, but he didn’t say anything. Once he was clear of the house, the signal was given and the hoses leapt into action again. The fireman offered him an oxygen mask, which he thought was silly, but once he put it on he realized what hard work his lungs had been doing for the past week.
The house looked bigger from here, in the flash of the truck lights, dripping with water, the chimney sending up a cymbal crash and spray when hit. The firefighters seemed to spend more time on his house than they had on the others on his block. Perhaps it was because he was here watching. Or perhaps because the house real
ly was bigger than he had ever thought. Bloated and useless, propped up by false import. Roger suddenly wanted to throw himself in front of the hoses, wrestle the men working them to the ground. Let it burn, he muttered to himself instead. He said it aloud: let it burn.
WOOF (4)
March 5, 2013
March 5, 2013
3:59 PM G______: yes, use our chats for the story. no, don't credit me. no, don't pay me.
me: you are sweet. and thanks.
4:01 PM me: i would insist upon paying you, not that it would ever be much money, but you never know it could be.
G______: nah, if you make big $, just fly me to Canada for a fancy dinner
4:03 PM me: and what if the book turns into harry potter 2. dude our wooing each other could make you a squzillionaire.
G______: i'd love to be a squillionaire, but you're the one doing the work.
me: i'm really excited about this. i'll send you some stuff perhaps next week to look at. and like i said, if at any point you say no, then that's cool too.
4:04 PM me: if you were in front of me right now i would give you a kiss that you would never forget. just saying.
G______: sweet. the only thing i request is you keep me a private citizen
4:05 PM G______: which you already said in your email
4:06 PM me: like don't name you? yes, of course. you should know that i'm gonna keep myself in there, be really honest about that. but i think we have to change your name.
G______: i like the idea, this social media stuff is crazy but fun
4:08 PM me: i hope you like what i come up with. and can i just tell you this makes me so happy i could cry. thank you thank you for your trust on this.
4:09 PM G______: when i become a postman years later i wanna see your short story collection in the windows and find the dedication to me inside the front cover
me: you got it.