After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  Ginrich stood, as did Barnes.

  “This has nothing to do with this case,” Ginrich said. “I don’t particularly like you.”

  “Feelings are mutual.”

  “I have already talked with Hunter as well as some of the smokejumpers who were on that fire. They all more or less agree with what you told the investigators. But Downey is a proud man. He loves his son and doesn’t want any mark on his family.”

  “His son did not kill anybody. His son is not to blame for what happened.”

  “Blame is not the matter, really. It’s legacy. And right now, his son doesn’t leave the picture he wants.”

  “A legacy?”

  “A hero.”

  “There weren’t any heroes. Max went after that fire as tough as he could. We could have done it better, smarter, but he was a good man.”

  “But the report implies he did some things wrong.”

  “The report is right.”

  “You see. That’s not what Downey wants to hear.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear the truth?”

  “It’s not a matter of truths or lies. It’s a matter of perception. And that’s why I’m telling you this. If this goes to court, I’ll fry your ass. I’ll present the perception that, as you say, you are responsible for what took place on that mountain. I’m telling you this so that you can work with us to clear the name of his son.”

  “You want me to lie.”

  “No. I want you to present a perception.”

  Barnes shook his head. “I’ve got things to do. You can show yourself out.”

  “Don’t fight us on this. You’ll lose. You’ll lose a lot. I’d rather not take this to court, because there is always the possibility that things could get rather ugly for Downey, turn out bad. I’m going to try and talk him out of this, but if he decides to go forward, I’ll be with him one hundred percent. Do you understand? If, in court, you don’t help me paint his son in a favorable light, I’ll fry your ass. I’ll take this letter and hang you with it. All of the bureaucrats and government lawyers together won’t be able to keep me from hanging everything about this fire on your head and then I’ll hang you.”

  Twenty minutes after Downey left, Barnes walked next door to Ruth’s house. He thought he could join their morning ritual before Call started Grace to school, lounge for a moment in the love of three generations. Leaving the warmth of his house, Barnes felt a chill from the drizzle outside. The world was so large, he thought, a spiderweb of people and things and emotions. So much so that changes always floated in the air. He thought of how we believe that we live in separate kingdoms, secure and constant, alive with possibilities as old as the land itself. He had discovered, however, that a day turns its corner and suddenly we can live in an exile, fragile and transparent as thin ice.

  When on fire assignment, Barnes knew the exact parameters of his world. The actual world existed inside the scraped and charred boundary of the fire for those days or weeks he spent on that fire. Everything else, and everyone else, ceased at the horizon, and the rest of the world became lost for that period of time.

  When the fire ended, though, he would return like a forgotten son. As long as the world’s scars remained minor, he could look forward to the next fire. Since the previous summer’s deaths, however, nothing had remained minor. The sudden exiles, these moments which seemed to have taken lease on his life, these that Barnes had lived through since the middle of the past fire season and which Ruth was now entering, created exclusions for which and from which there seemed no coherency.

  Barnes watched a car slow to the stop sign at the street corner which bordered Ruth’s house. The car left the intersection, a spray of water ducktailing off the wet blacktop.

  As the car’s spray filtered down to the blacktop, Tri-pod scurried across the road carrying a black walnut in his mouth. One of Barnes’s favorite moments each morning was seeing that the squirrel had made it through another day of car dodging. Barnes had fed Tri-pod all winter, leaving pecans lining the top of his back fence or walnuts under the elm out front. He knew the other squirrels, those he called Gray-tip and Split-tail, stole their share but he did not care too much. Tri-pod was his favorite—it takes guts, he thought, to be a three-legged squirrel in a world of fast four-wheeled cars.

  Barnes watched Tri-pod until the squirrel had climbed an elm and disappeared in its foliage, then he walked the porch stairs to where Ruth stood wrapped inside her own hug. She looked out toward the streams of rainwater in the gutters of the street. He spoke casually, tilting his head toward the front yard, “I think ole’ Tri-pod is nesting in the elm.”

  “Appears to be,” Ruth answered without looking up.

  “Hope Call doesn’t take a notion to start shooting squirrels also.”

  Ruth smiled. “If he stalks around naked on the porch with that intent, I hope that squirrel harvests his nuts.”

  Barnes grimaced. “That’s not even a comfortable thought.”

  “Some men could do with a little emasculation.”

  A pause followed.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  He did not look straight at Ruth. He looked at the slight rainfall behind her and the squirrel jumping between branches in the old elm. He wanted to keep his thoughts collected and to keep his tone unburnished, but he feared his words carried an emptiness as they both stared at spots in midair.

  Ruth finally nodded her head in answer.

  Barnes asked, “Where’s Grace?”

  Ruth lifted her gaze, the first cognizant movement toward Barnes standing next to her, and Barnes watched her face react to his. He saw a fine woman of lasting beauty not unhappy in her provisional life. Her eyes, as she looked at him, looked empty to him, remnant tears and little recognition. Open windows.

  From inside the house, a child’s voice called, “I’m here.”

  “You’re here?” Barnes echoed, for the moment glad to leave Ruth’s eyes.

  Grace opened the front screen and stood with her hands on her hips. A defiant smile crossed her mouth. “I’m here,” she repeated with a huff, her chin lifted.

  “Hello, ‘Here,’” Barnes said.

  “Oh, Barnes, you’re silly.” She stepped back into the house, closing both the screen and the door.

  “You have breakfast?” Ruth asked Barnes.

  “Coffee straight up,” he answered.

  “Let’s eat, bud. I feel like making someone breakfast and watching him eat it at the table.”

  “You want to talk?”

  “About Robert? Not yet, not just yet. While you’re eating and Grace has gone to school, then we can talk.”

  Ruth poured the remains of her coffee off the porch to mix in her yard with the rain. Raking her fingers through her hair, she turned to enter the house.

  Barnes followed. He had sometimes wondered what it would be like to sleep with Ruth, but had always swept the thought from his mind like a sudden change in the weather. She is married, he told himself whenever the thought came, and she has a beautiful daughter and a good father and things are better than good as they are. He told himself not to lose what he already had. In the last months, he had become even better at that, pushing from his thoughts those he wished to keep at a distance. He could not, though, keep the dreams from surfacing at night.

  At the dining room table with her arms circled around a bowl of Fruit Loops sat Grace. In front of her was propped a picture book of whales opened to show the tail of an orca slapping the water’s surface.

  “Hi, Barnes,” she said, then looked again at her book.

  “Almost done, sweetheart?” Ruth asked her. Ruth stood straighter than she had on the porch and tilted her head up, a mask of strength that Barnes recognized.

  “Yes. Why? Why are whales in the ocean?” And she turned to look at Ruth with the question written across her brow, like, Barnes thought, like it was the only thing that mattered then. And maybe, he thought, that was all that should matter.

  “Because,” Ruth said,
then she looked to Barnes for help but he only shrugged. “Because that’s the way it is,” she said, “because people live in houses and birds fly, I guess.”

  Grace accepted the answer and finished the rest of her cereal.

  Across the table from Grace sat Call, Ruth’s father. A slender man with skin baked the color of terra cotta, hair gray and full and flowing over his collar, and an early and slight palsy shaking his hands. He looked as much of a rogue as Barnes had always imagined him being in his youth. Call removed the unlit pipe he kept in the corner of his mouth and greeted Barnes, “How you doing, son?”

  “Wet.”

  “Ain’t that the damn truth.”

  “Daddy.” Ruth tilted her head in the direction of Grace, who appeared much more interested in the photographs of her book than in anything any of the adults in the room might say.

  Call just smiled and said, “Finish your juice, little darling, because we have to get you to that school of yours. And,” he winked at Ruth, “I got me a date for breakfast.”

  “With whom?” Ruth asked. She had begun to pull jars from her cupboard but stopped to turn back to face Call at the table.

  “The ‘whom’ I’m meeting for breakfast is nobody’s business, but I do like your proper English, girl. All that money I spent on college paid off.” He winked again, this time at Barnes.

  “Daddy, you didn’t spend anything on my college. I went to school on scholarships. Your money went elsewhere.”

  He squinted and shook his head. “Whiskey and women, Barnes. The rest I just squandered away.”

  “Daddy.” Again Ruth tilted her head toward Grace.

  “You ready?” Call asked Grace. He placed his pipe back in the corner of his smile where it usually rested, lit or unlit. He fired the pipe only in his study and then only when Grace was asleep upstairs or not home. “My genes,” he had said once as he tapped tobacco into the pipe’s bowl, “will pass on enough bad habits to that little girl without my environment adding to them.”

  “Is your date with The Rover?” Ruth asked.

  “You’re fishing, honey,” Call said with a smile. “Since when did I ever call my visits with that old coot a date? But, yes, I’ll be meeting him for a game of dominoes later this morning.” He added after a calculated moment of silence, “After my date.”

  “I’m ready,” Grace announced. “I want to take something.” She thought for a moment. “My whale. My big whale.” She pushed herself from the table, climbed off her chair, and put her dishes on the counter in the kitchen. Then she hugged Ruth’s legs and Ruth bent down to kiss her. They each said good-bye and Grace skipped from the room.

  Call pushed himself from his seat with a slow groan as though he was constructed of rough timbers and rusty hinges. Call and Barnes had shared more than a few bottles of Guinness and fingers of Bushmills when Ruth had left town to join Robert at a literary conference somewhere. The two men would sit with Grace until she went to bed, then one of them would read a couple of stories to her before joining the other for a nightcap on the porch if it was a warm month or in the large leather chairs of Call’s study if it was winter. The room smelled of leather and old books and pipe tobacco, a symphony of smells that would quickly place Barnes at ease.

  Barnes liked Call, considered him a good man, which, Call had once told him as they both studied the amber shadows thrown from their whiskey glasses, is as good a thing as one man can say about another. They talked often of war and wildfires, loving and losing, restlessness and recklessness.

  Barnes had, since moving into the house Call had built years ago for his mother-in-law, considered Call a surrogate for his own father, who had died years earlier without either Barnes or his father ever being able to say they loved the other. Barnes had told Call that, about his father and him, and Call told him that sons and fathers are often too stupid to say what’s really important in this world. “Something genetic,” he added with a sigh.

  As he rose slowly from the table, the old man took a deep breath, smiling as though that might be his last, then limped across the room toward the door. Barnes could see Call in his youth jumping from a hovering helicopter into the neck-deep waters of a swamp in central Vietnam. Call had gone to Vietnam in 1965, a husband and father, a thirty-two-year-old man who believed his cause was good and right. He arrived with the confidence of innocence and left with a handful of medals, a couple of ounces of shrapnel still in his legs and back, and deeper scars he could neither see nor heal. He told Barnes that some nights he still woke with his stomach wrenched and his hands balled into fists at the memory of his war. He told Barnes that some mornings he still woke with the ghosts of men who had died because of his decisions.

  Grace skipped back into the kitchen doorway past Call as he left the room and blew kisses at Ruth and Barnes, then she and Call left. The front door shut. To Barnes, it sounded hollow in the echo of the big house.

  He sat at the breakfast nook where Call had sat and watched Ruth. She broke two eggs one-handed into a skillet, dropped bread into the toaster, and poured a glass of orange juice. She stood over the stove while the eggs snapped in the hot oil. She twirled her wedding ring and Barnes could see a tear form in her eye. She looked as though she was trying hard to reenter a world from which she had been cast out, a world in which leavings are either innocent or accidental, but seldom desired.

  She spatulad the eggs from the pan onto a plate and buttered the toast, but she did not bring them to the table. She stood in a terrible sadness like someone atop a high, cold cornice looking into the yawning of a fogged valley. Barnes watched her gather her strength as she stood rocking slowly against the kitchen counter.

  “Everything confuses me.” Her words seemed a sigh. With Grace and Call gone, the strength had run from her and even her words were tired.

  For a moment there was a stasis in the current of the room. An arithmetic of silence stopped time while Ruth and Barnes looked at each other.

  Barnes stood. Ruth lifted her left arm toward Barnes while her right hand traced circles across the linoleum of the kitchen counter. Barnes walked into the embrace of her single arm and then she lifted the other arm and folded it around him. They nestled their faces in each other’s neck.

  While Barnes ate, Ruth told him the story. She first told Barnes what he already knew, about her meeting Robert while in college and later marrying him, about Call not liking Robert from the first handshake but allowing his daughter to make her own mistakes, about her pregnancy and the birth of Grace, about their years living together in Call’s house, about their slow slide away from one another. Barnes understood she needed to tell him everything, like a storm beginning slowly and increasing until it finally blows itself out. The few times she lifted her gaze from the kitchen window to look at Barnes, he could see that her eyes were puffy, red afterthoughts of the passing storm aligned over her clear face.

  Barnes ate the breakfast not as much out of hunger, although he was, but from an understanding that Ruth needed to do something for someone else, that she needed to feel needed. So he ate and she talked in a voice almost sinking into a whisper. She would stop occasionally, her feet tapping a slight rhythm on the rug she stood on, as though she had to think for a moment before continuing. Barnes would look up from his plate and see her picking her way through the trails and false starts of her marriage.

  Robert, whom she had married when she was almost thirty and stayed married to for over a decade despite his distance, was leaving her, she repeated. He had not yet told her, but she knew. She did not know if he was leaving for another woman or for his career or for both, but she knew he was leaving sometime soon. He no longer touched her when he came to bed, he did not look at her when they passed in the hall, he worked on his papers until she had finished supper before eating his cold. She joked about how he held a book with greater tenderness, but she and Barnes could only force empty laughs.

  Ruth talked about how Robert made his living and supported his family with books. He taught
literature at the university, had in fact taught some of Barnes’s crewmembers over the years. Robert had published little but somehow had brokered an associate professor’s position. Still he worked hard at his classes and often spent weekends attending literary conferences with others who liked to talk about Austen or Keats. Barnes had often believed that Robert preferred the life of books to the life of blood. “Books,” Call had once offered in discussion, “offer little risk.” Call had said to Barnes that he always respected a man who worked hard for his family but not a man who worked long because of his family. After twelve years of his daughter’s marriage to Robert, Call still did not like Robert.

  In an irony Ruth could not help but smile at, she said that literature was one of the things that had first attracted her to Robert. She was twenty-one and possessed of a wild heart. She liked the sound of beautiful words and thought that a man in possession of those words was also in possession of much more. In time Robert began to live more inside the walls of words and eventually it seemed that all Robert embraced were those words. They learned how to live with his life and without hers.

  Grace, however, became Ruth’s second chance, a beautiful, spirited girl of whom even Ruth questioned that Robert could have been the father. Robert, although he loved Grace, was far more comfortable in front of a computer screen than behind a swing.

  Ruth told Barnes as he wiped his plate clean with the last of his toast that she had stayed with Robert for the best of reasons—their daughter, Grace—which she conceded was the worst of reasons.

  “You know how,” Ruth said, “when you’re young and you just know that you’re meant for something special? Did you feel that way?” She looked at Barnes.

  “Yes.” Barnes had finished his meal and arranged his knife and fork on the plate. “Everyone wants to be remembered,” he said as Ruth poured coffee for them. “To be more than just a flash in the dark.”