by Linda Hogan
Now she would have to come up with smoked salmon, blankets, woven baskets, and money. Goods for the journey of words northward. Something for each person who will speak and pass along word of their need. This year there were no berries to dry and offer. She’d already been robbed of most of her earthly goods by the men and boys who hated her protest against them, and now she might not even have fish to sell.
She forgets how practiced she is in new beginnings.
Ruth stops at the Marco Polo long enough to get some things and then walks to town and, saying nothing about what has just happened, she takes her mother to Linda’s for pie, made this year of canned ingredients.
“It’s just not the same.” Aurora puts down her fork.
“Yeah. Nothing is,” Linda says, looking out at the black rocks, dismal. The pencil in her jeans pocket breaks when she sits down. “Damn, I keep doing that! Do you know how many pencils I go through in a day?”
In the forest, two young men each carry a gallon of gasoline. Michael David, age thirty, and his younger friend, General. They have been paid to start a fire. They would not be caught. It is guaranteed. They had Ruth’s wallet and they would leave it behind. She’d already been caught starting fires by Dick Russell, and the Department of Forestry. The women make small burns in order to grow their grasses for weaving. They know she’d be the prime suspect. And there is going to be a new hunt as soon as possible. These boys want to be part of it. Michael David and his friend have brought the two gallons of gasoline to pour over stacks of dried pine needles and down a line of forest. It has been so dry it won’t take long at all for the fire to take, and it doesn’t. As soon as the smell begins, as soon as the fire is lit, the crackling sound becomes loud and the smoke begins to rise.
At first Michael calls out as if winning a war. He is jubilant and cries out, then the flame turns toward him and he begins coughing but still laughing until General realizes the wind has shifted. “We gotta get out of here!” he yells, coughing, his own eyes burning and tearing. The great flames begin to catch and rise up tree trunks, then tree to tree, and it is mesmerizing to look at, but frightening, too, as if they are being bombed. There are loud sounds of cracking and popping, explosions as the fire travels not away from them but toward them.
Michael backs away first, then he begins running. General is hit by a flame and screams as his shirt catches fire. He runs and takes it off at the same time, screaming. He is badly burned and all General can do is get in the car, crying, “Oh man, oh man. Look at me. Oh shit!” And the smell, like meat cooking.
“We’ll fix it,” says Michael. “We’ll go home and fix it.”
“No, man, you gotta take me to the hospital.”
“Then they’d know it was us.”
“Forget it.” He is crying. “I gotta go to the hospital.” Then he falls silent, eyes wide open.
Michael drops the wallet on the road where it won’t burn.
As he drives, Michael concocts a lie. They were on their way to go fishing when they saw the fire. They tried to put it out. General took off his shirt to smother it.
Meantime, smoke is seen as far away as Kimbal and the fire trucks pass them on the highway, loud sirens screaming, and later there will be the copters and planes and one fireman takes a look at the boys’ car and tries to get their license plate, but it is hard to do, as quickly as both vehicles are driving. ARL3 is all he got. But the car, anyway, belongs to a man named Dwight, they discover, who will have an alibi because he is in Watertown visiting his sister.
At Linda’s café, half the town hears the sound of loud trucks full of water. They mistakenly think they are the trucks bringing them the water they’ve been loading into five-gallon drums to take home. But the trucks pass by. They don’t hear the sirens.
In the distance there is still smoke. In the little dried-up town on the reservation they think at first it is a rain cloud. Soon the world is red with the fire bursting from the trees, crowning, spreading, a horrible rose-colored light. “What more could happen?” says Aurora. But at least no wind is blowing in the deathlike stillness. Still, they watch the news until late that night.
Dick Russell is the Forest Service employee who first sees the fire. He is the sole worker for the area near the reservation. He has also been a fire jumper, but the chemicals had given all the men on his crew Hodgkin’s disease and cancer. He is one of the few survivors of his team and now he just likes to work the forest.
He is a mixed-blood from a tribe farther north where he knew an old woman who was able to stop fires. He had forgotten about her, but now she comes to mind and he calls home and has them fly her in. He picks her up at the airport and drives the distance to Dark River. She arrives in town and eats a hamburger and then he takes her to the fire and she says, after she looks over the situation, slowly, “Okay now, you go away,” and he does as he is told, though he is afraid to leave her alone. But all the while he waits, he remembers the Hawaiian queen who stopped the volcano. First, they had to take her to Hilo and put her up in the most expensive hotel, then feed her the finest of meals. Then she instructed the needy people to bring her bed and some other furniture along, including her special pillow, filled with the softest bird down. Well fed, happy, not in a hurry, she had them place her bed in the path of the volcano and sure enough the lava ended right where she slept.
And so this old woman from the north, not having such a bed, lays her large body down on the ground in the direction fire is traveling and she begins singing and talking to the fire and the fire dies out just before reaching her withered old body, so like an ancient tree itself. But no one knows anything about how the fire ended, just that it must have run its course. Dick Russell and the woman celebrate that evening with halibut chips in the local tavern and she is nearly toothless, too, but still wants corn on the cob. Then she wants to see her relatives at the old white houses and, because of the drought, Randall drives his dune buggy across the bay to the old people, who laugh when they see the Fire Extinguisher, as they call her.
“So, it was you. We were getting so worried.”
The sheriff found what the boys left behind, Ruth’s wallet, proof of her tribal identification, driver’s license, some cash, insurance card, boat license, and other information.
A few weeks later a rainbow curves overhead. The people who have remained go out to look at it. Clouds float over, but they are thin and high, with no rain.
“Aye,” says Wilma. “It must be raining high up. It’s a shame it passed us over. Oh, we need it. Come down, cloud. Come to us. Our plants are dried yellow. Our houses are ugly and dusty. Our fish are gone. Our cousins and friends have gone away.”
That afternoon a stranger comes to town. He rents a room at the Midtown Motel, where the yellowed ceiling had already started to leak even before he arrived. “You gotta see this,” Al, the owner of the motel, said to his wife Thelma the previous Thursday. He had examined the ceiling, the roof, and the plumbing. There wasn’t any possible place to leak. “Damn. It’s supernatural,” he said to her.
When the strange man comes to town, he requests that room.
“It has a leak,” Al tells him.
“It’s okay. That room has memories for me.”
Al rents it to him. Who else would take it, anyway? “But still, why would he want to be in there?” he asks Thelma. He takes the man buckets to catch the water. Maybe the drought had affected the guy. Maybe he wants to be near any water. Then, too, Thelma says, “Maybe it’s a miracle. The Catholics would know, wouldn’t they? Maybe he’s a priest.”
The new man is somewhat handsome and beautifully dark with unusual eyes. He wears nice jeans and a long ponytail. Someone has ironed and creased his pants so it is assumed that he has a woman at home, probably a wife or girlfriend. On the other hand, Linda says, “Maybe he has money and sends them out to the laundry.” Anyway, the girls and women keep watch on him, his nice thin legs, his quiet manner, his hands fine enough to be an artist’s hands. At first even the
older women eye him, but not for long, and after a while, when the young women smile at him, their mothers and aunts poke them with their elbows. They’ve had time and experience enough to assess him better than the young girls. There aren’t words for it yet, what is strange about him. “Something about this man is not quite right.”
Except for his exceptional legs and good looks, he seems ordinary enough to most. He eats at Linda’s restaurant and leaves better tips than the other men, making them feel cheap. She gives him special service and wants to run her hands down his hair, his back. He says “Good morning,” in a cheerful, mannerly voice and the other men look up from their coffee cups and conversations about what they used to catch besides the clap. Unlike the other visitors and strangers to town, he doesn’t complain about the lack of water. Unlike the tourists, he doesn’t pass through quickly because the ocean is so far away. He is friendly, but still is shy and withdrawn. No matter who tries, they can’t get to know him.
He isn’t a fisherman, that much is certain. He seems to find a beauty in the desolation because he is often seen out in the moonlight standing where the water once was, looking into the moonlit distances, looking all around as if he could even see where Ruth had been caulking and painting the boat in case the Rain Priest, when he arrives, needs the boat in better repair. Of course, she is the only one who knows about her visit to the once-white dwelling places.
He walks and he collects shining things from the land that was once ocean and from the streets.
After a while, the Christian converts feel afraid of him, and there are many. Except Wilma says to them, “Think of all the strange things in Christianity. What about the fishermen following Jesus Christ? Just how likely do you think that would be? Look at old Vince. Think about it, will you? Would he lay down his nets and follow a man that looked like Jesus?”
They picture Vince, a cigarette in his teeth, talking and pulling in his nets all at the same time, cursing, and how he sometimes stepped on live fish but never fell the way they wished he would. Yeah, what were the chances that could happen? Would he lay down his nets? They were comforted even if what Wilma said didn’t fit the context at all.
Then one night in Linda’s café, the stranger with unusual eyes stands up, and in front of Aurora, Linda, Dwight, and the others he has avoided, simply and for no reason anyone could understand, he announces, “Everything here is out of balance. I have to leave for a while.” He leaves too much money on the table and walks straight-backed out the door, with everyone watching, thinking he is a crazy transient after all.
“The hell,” says one of the men.
Linda, towel in hand, goes over to the window and watches him walk away. Others join her. “No. He’s right,” she says. “It’s not just the drought. It’s something else. Something here caused it.” She feels it, too, the lack of balance. She doesn’t mention the whale hunt. It’s been the largest silence of all.
Vince, the best fisherman in the café, has ignored all the gossip about the man. He is smoking, his face pale, “You know, it’s true. Things aren’t right.” He blows out the smoke. “I just had a weird experience. My boat was just jammed up on a stone. The wood was going to crack if it stayed there because it’s so dry. You know how I used to work for the mines. I know how to take out a rock. Damned if I didn’t have to cut open that stone, and damned if I didn’t find fifty-three toads in there. Plus one I killed by accident. Toads. There weren’t no holes in it, either, for a toad to get in. They hopped away toward the river.”
“Vince, don’t creep out my customers.” Linda poured him more coffee. “Besides, the river’s a long way off.”
“It is. I know it. They’re probably still out there hopping and you don’t believe me.”
Ruth is up early in the morning, outside, breathing. The early morning songs of seabirds are gone, but the rose of light still comes to the land far away, as if starting at the bottom, coming from the earth. Then it rises.
The pilings of the pier look like black bones. Everything is skeletal. The large pile of stone, it looks like, made of cans from the factory, shines at the top, silver in the light. The rest has sediment and years of earth have turned it to rock. There are boat houses on sand. It should be salmon season, she thinks, hoping they will return one day and are not all dead.
Ruth is surprised when the police and the man she recognizes from the Forest Service come to question her at her mother’s house.
“Come in,” she says. Thinking at first that they are there about the whale or her son.
Then one says, “How long have you been starting fires?”
She laughs.
“How long have you been lighting fires?” the man repeats. He has a mustache. She looks at his eyes. He is serious.
“We light one every year for our basket grasses. They need fire to grow. Why?”
Then she realizes the men are trying to get her for starting the fire. She thinks, perhaps there is no end to the anger, the hatred, for telling the truth about the whale, for calling the paper, for talking and protesting. “We didn’t light one this year because of the drought.”
Dick Russell says nothing to the sheriff because the feds are going to be called in and he wants to know what’s going on here. He wants the feds. Later he’ll bring out his evidence.
Aurora has been listening. “She hasn’t been out there. I can vouch for her. I’m her alibi.”
“You’re her mother.” The sheriff is cold. He looks Ruth up and down. For signs, for feet with ash.
Russell knows Ruth didn’t do it because he knows the forest and the land. It was burned in a place where those grasses wouldn’t grow, so after the sheriff leaves, he orders an investigation of his own. And later the old people will tell the Fire Extinguisher that Ruth had been with them, sleeping on the little pile of blankets they had made for her.
Dick Russell, the one who listens to the questioning, looks at the few baskets they have left. He studies them. “Do you mind if I take one of these? I’ll bring it back.”
“Do I have any choice?” Aurora is worried. It’s an older basket. It has memories and she hears songs in it.
The phone rings. It’s about the injured boy.
“It’s for you.” Ruth hands it to the Russell.
Dick Russell already knows about the boy with the burns. He’d already received a call. But he’d known it wasn’t Ruth even before he heard about General. The plants she wanted didn’t grow there. The young men hadn’t figured on that. Then Dwight had said he’d driven past on his way out of town and seen her going into the forest. Russell knows the timing is wrong. Dwight must have lied about being at his sister’s in town.
And General is in the hospital, the burn in the shape of his shirt, a flammable fabric, but General doesn’t feel lucky and later Michael David would tell on him, each of them putting all the blame on the other. A few days later, Michael went to Dwight to get paid. Cash, so they couldn’t trace it. But he was followed by the police.
As it turned out, Ruth had been over at the place of the once-white houses, Fire Extinguisher tells Russell when he goes to pick her up with his dune buggy a few days later.
But then General, in so much pain, confessed and Michael was picked up, though he wouldn’t turn in Dwight. Michael couldn’t have been smart enough or honest enough because he hardly knew right from wrong. His mother had been a heavy drinker and Michael smelled like alcohol at his birth; the whole town knew it. He wasn’t held in jail for very long; instead, he was sent to stay with his grandmother. Threatened by Dwight if he told, he kept silent about the money. He also believed he would be a great whaler soon, and he told that to the police in order to impress them. But not long after that the grandmother called the police and said her grandson just bought a new boom box and running shoes, and she didn’t know where he got the money.
So the police began to ask him more questions.
Thomas, too, had seen fires, smelled smoke in the war, and the odor made him remember, all these year
s later, being pushed out of the copter by the sad man who sent most of them down to hell and to their sure deaths. He had heard about Ruth; Aurora had gone to his house to cry that she was afraid her daughter would be arrested. “Ruth’s too smart to start a fire during the drought.” He calmed her with his words.
Everyone knew Ruth worshiped the forest and she had cried as she watched the smoke rising over it and the way the air above the heat moved as if a mirage of water.
Dick Russell knocks on the door of Aurora’s house.
Ruth has been crying. It’s unusual for her. But lately she’s restless. She paces at times. She cleans her face before she goes to the door. He notices anyway.
“Do you ever eat?” he asks.
She thinks he is implying that she is too thin.
“Well, how about dinner tonight? I’ll pick you up at seven.” He smiles. Randall is younger than Ruth. He is a mixed-blood and clean-cut. He wears his hair short and his clothes are fresh. In his mind, she is not a suspect.
She looks at him. She hasn’t thought of him as a friend. “Okay, sure.” She’s uncomfortable with the idea, but she needs an ally. “I’ll see you then.”
Like Ruth, he knows the horsetail and how it is used for arthritis, the oldest of plants on earth. Silica its makeup.
Russell has gone along with the sheriff. He’s Indian. He wants to know about Marco. He wants to know about the whale. Even though he is already in trouble for raising problems and his job is on the line for getting involved in Indian affairs. There’s enough evidence, says his boss, who believes himself the salt of the earth, but they still believe Ruth is a perpetrator of some sort. That’s what they call it. Not a culprit. A perp.