“What happened?” Orlynne cried.
“He collapsed. It was sudden. Like he’d been hit with something. I think maybe it was a stroke.”
Kyle lowered Gerald to the embankment edge, got in the water himself before pulling Gerald along after. It was a messy business to get Gerald in the canoe and hard to get afloat with the extra weight, but eventually Kyle shoved the boat out to the channel and they caught the current. He climbed up into the stern and steered them through the next deep bend. The river would be getting big soon and with the added weight there was little freeboard, only a couple of inches between the boat’s gunwales and the waterline. He glanced from reading the river to where Orlynne cradled Gerald against her. The old man’s only movement was in the slight rise and fall of his unsteady breaths. Kyle knew he needed to handle the canoe without fault as they entered the rapids. If they took on much water at all the boat would slow and swamp, and if they couldn’t stay afloat, there was little chance for Orlynne and none for Gerald.
They struck a big rock on the left bow. The blow thumped down the entire length of the canoe. Laura showed her pale face briefly over her shoulder, called back, “Sorry.”
They had entered a stretch of dark water and their eyes were slow to adjust. Kyle had little more than memory of previous runs to aid him now. Even if Laura saw a hazard ahead it would be too late for Kyle to correct.
“Dig in!” he shouted.
The water had begun to feather and surge. Ahead, a smooth rush of river sculpted against a jagged log inches beneath the surface. Kyle swung his paddle hard against the current to back water, and the bow clocked abruptly to the left. They glided past, the bottom juddering.
They were in a steady run now, and Kyle patterned himself against the water, sensing rapids entries as much as actually perceiving them. The river turned again, took them toward the fires for a while so that the light improved as they shot a medium-size rapid. But soon the water shallowed and he and Laura had to stop several times to shove and drag the boat across a maze of slick ledges and footcatches. Gerald remained terribly still.
Once past the portage the water quickened so that Laura had her feet knocked out from under her before she could climb back into the boat. When she fell her paddle came free and floated out of sight. Kyle helped her back in and pushed off, pulling deep strokes to try and catch the paddle.
“I can’t see anything!” she cried.
“There, look there. It’s hung on that rock.”
He leaned hard on the paddle and brought the canoe up beside where Laura’s paddle had floated and been carried up by an eddy. They bumped and ground against the edge of the stone. Laura timed her grab and plucked the paddle up by its end, then turned it around and pushed off. The boat reluctantly slew over and they caught the main current, drifted forward once more.
“Hold on steady, now,” Kyle told her.
Smoke flooded his view and he heard the new train of rapids well before he could see them. As they entered he could immediately tell the flow was running much stronger than normal. Before he could correct to the right side he struck a protruding rock so hard that he was amazed it didn’t split them right there. He backed water but doing so took him toward the bank. A branch as big as his wrist slapped him across the shoulder. Nausea coursed through.
“Kyle, are you okay?”
He nodded, dug his paddle in, and guided them back to where the river howled.
39
THE COLLISION HAD THROWN HARRISON AGAINST THE DR IVER’S window, but he remained conscious. His immediate surroundings were all ring and hum. He shook his head clear and tried the door; it was wedged tight against the road bank and left no room to exit. On the opposite side, the door had been crushed and the nose of the van remained buried there. He heard a door creak open, saw Jonathan lurch free of the van. Harrison quickly lowered the driver’s window, grabbed the bag of money, and slithered atop the bank still hot with embers. He pulled one of his pistols and fired off six blind shots before turning to run.
Behind there were shots. He both heard and felt them in the air around him. He ducked behind an outcropping, heard a pair of rounds dig and split the stone into a confetti of hard splinters. He snatched the second pistol from his waistband and took aim at the form coming up the road. Two quick shots and he saw him waver and disappear behind a rolling bank of smoke. He waited, focused his attention on the obscured area. A long time seemed to pass, but he didn’t move, until finally he did.
A bullet struck and buried in his hand. By the pain, he knew immediately that the round had found bone. He ran, knew the shot had come from his flank. He had dropped his handgun and he felt that what strength he had was fleeing. The wound slickened with blood. Each few feet he staggered and caught himself against a burnt tree, tried to master his breathing. Another shot punched the bark an inch from his skull. A bank of smoke surrounded him.
Depth seemed to collapse and an odd calm overtook him. He heard the singing of flames. He had no other choice. He plunged into the source of the smoke, staying low to breathe. More shots screamed, but the weird dimensions of firelight cast against the smoke made them seem unreal. The only real thing just then was the pain in his hand. He wrestled his shirt over his head and tore a long strip of cloth with his teeth. The binding of the wound did little to staunch the flow of blood, but at least hid the injury from sight. He crouched behind a wall of half-buried rock, felt something hard beneath him. He shifted to see what it was when he saw the faint etching of a name. A few feet further he saw a small obelisk and beyond that a symbolic bell and a pair of marble hands. Refuge here in an old cemetery, forgotten for some indefinite period of time beneath the crawling vine and second growth but made new in the hungry fire.
Thirst came on him with impossible urgency. He knew dying men cried out for two things—their mothers and water. If he was going to die, he would want it to be in a place that mattered. A place where he could come and have all his bodily desire fulfilled. In that moment it seemed that he was at the center of a thriving garden of fire.
Like a wraith, Jonathan appeared in profile. Smoke parted and invoked him here amid the tombstones. The pistol hung at his side as he was blinded by the smoke. Harrison threw his full weight against him. Then it was all surge and reflex. Two animals kicked, strangled, and gouged at one another in the stinging heat until they came apart, the distance between a buffer against mutual murder.
Harrison’s sense of direction deserted him. Everything was pain and radiance. He had staggered farther into the fire’s belly. His skin blackened as he hurried through the flames and falling debris. He felt his throat closing down. He did not look back to see if Jonathan had followed him in, but if he had he would have beheld a figure at peace with the casual violence and how it dismembered him when the great burning limb crashed down. It came almost as a relief. Almost as an answer to something long sought and only here, in the end, discovered.
Harrison, though, fought through the heat toward some clearing beyond, took a step into the edge of a different borderland only to find the ground dissipate, and for several seconds he was suspended in the cool and dark air.
Then the river grabbed him.
40
FRANK AND TURNER GOT TO UNCLE VIRGIL’S HOUSE FIRST, BUT COULD find no evidence of him.
“Do you think he got out?” Frank shouted above the clamor. The fire had run to within a dozen yards of the house. It would leap to the roof within minutes.
“No, his truck’s still here. He must have headed up to my aunt’s place.”
Frank remembered the woman named Meredith Sue. She had come to the door with a walker. A small lady with pale, distracted eyes. A woman who’d lived much of her life as a shut-in. Still, she had welcomed them, promised she’d be proud to vote if her brother Virgil would give her a ride into town. In the end, she seemed just to be happy to have someone to talk with her.
They got back out to the road. It got narrow this far into the cove and the heat from both sides
was hard to take. There was no way around it. It would be easy to get cut off back here. That would be the end of things. Already, direction was hard to determine. If any more trees came down across the road they would lose a clear path.
When they topped the road crest they could see the house had already been engulfed in flames. Even from several hundred yards Frank could hear the different pitch of burning as the weather-treated timbers roared with chemical accelerant. Turner charged up the rest of the way. Frank was about to call out to him when he saw a flicker of movement to the left down a shallow draw. A great paw waved.
“They’re down at the creek!” Frank shouted, though his words were torn away by the inferno. Turner, not hearing, went on toward the house.
Frank got down to Virgil and Meredith Sue. They had found a good spot in the knee-deep water protected on each side by a tumbling of big granite. Remarkably, the air was cool.
“You better grab him,” Virgil shouted at Frank. “There ain’t a better place to hold up back here than where we’re at. There’s about two dozen burning trees up there. Any one of them is big enough to flatten a truck!”
As soon as Frank topped the run of rocks, the heat plashed down on him. Though his voice was swallowed by the din, he called Turner’s name until he went hoarse. The house was now entangled in such a welter of flames that its hard geometric lines had gone liquid. He was about to turn back for the creek bed when he saw Turner. He had collapsed just feet from the blazing house. In moments, the whole structure would founder like a struck beast and Turner would be gone. Frank went to him.
Frank hooked Turner’s motionless shoulder to drag him free from the immediate blast of heat and then worked him across his back. Crablike, he got to the edge of the draw and shuffled toward the creek. Virgil reached up a powerful hand and helped them both down to the safety of the waterline.
“We best stay put until this thing wears itself out!” Virgil yelled.
Frank nodded, the power of speech drawn out of him by the firestorm.
41
THROUGH MUCH OF THE NEXT HOUR KYLE STEERED THE RIVER BY memory. However, that memory was made imperfect by the changes worked by the storm. Rocks that should have been visible were lost by the smooth carving of strong current. Without warning, the canoe would transition from a sleepy drift into a tight, urgent run that had to be navigated expertly. It was hard to stay alert and ready for what the water would demand. The firescape had made the land into something broken and blighted, something conjured. If he looked into it too long, he felt as though he was losing part of himself.
Laura saw an odd shape pitched up on the rocks. At first it looked as if it were some broken remnants of a beaver dam that had washed up in the lee of the massive stone upthrust, but it was moving, and as they neared, Kyle could see that a man’s face looked back at him.
He backstroked and brought them in line with a bordering shoal where the water calmed and they could hold in place.
“See that just below him. He lets go and he goes into that hydraulic. That’s all undercut ledge there too. He gets into that and you’d be lucky to get him out with a winch. I don’t have a rope to throw him either. The only way is to steer in there close and grab him as we go past.”
“We’ve got to try,” Laura said.
“We don’t have enough room for him. He gets in and the whole boat will swamp at the next rapid.”
“We have room,” Orlynne said. Her voice seemed to come from an untested place in her throat. As soon as she said it Kyle realized that Gerald was dead.
“We have room,” Orlynne repeated, with conviction. “I need your help lifting Gerald over the side.”
“We can leave him on the shoreline. We can come back.”
“No, I don’t want him out there where he’ll have to lie out in the sun. I want him buried. Here. He loved this river. He would have chosen this. Help me.”
Kyle gathered Gerald beneath the arms and tumbled him into the water. The splash was gentle. He pushed him firmly into the current. The body flowed into the rush of movement. A second later the underpull seized him and he was lost beneath the stone and held there by the force of surging water. Orlynne wiped her eyes once, cried no more.
“We need to go on,” she said.
Kyle agreed. He shoved off with the paddle blade and set them on as close a line as he could and still be sure to stay out of the upcoming hydraulic themselves. It was all planning and delay and then they were committed and everything accelerated. The water bounced them forward before it flung them into an enormous dip. Kyle jammed the paddle deep into a current. It fought him with the strength of an animal contesting death. When he could delay no longer, he swung back hard and the bow bucked up and away. He could see the man’s eyes roll in recognition as they approached.
Laura and Orlynne grabbed hold of him and he was dragged along the side until they were beyond the crash of whitewater. He tried to lift himself but he had nothing left. Kyle took his hand and together they pulled him in. Almost as soon as he was aboard he passed out. For a moment Kyle thought they had exchanged one dead man for another, but from his chest came a troubled cough.
“Is there anything more to do for him?” Laura asked.
No one said anything, though Orlynne placed her hand across the man’s closed eyes, sheltered him in her small way.
42
SEVERAL TIMES THROUGH THE NIGHT KYLE HELD THE CANOE BACK IN deeper water until the fire had fully burned the banks and spent itself in the ranging hills. They had come too far to lose themselves to haste. A cell of lingering fire could still trap them. For several hours they simply watched the country burn, commenting on its terrible beauty and how no one would ever see something like it again in their lifetimes. Eventually, it diminished in the gradual appearance of daylight.
They came off the river early the next morning after they crossed over into green country. The newly quiet surroundings astonished them. The man they had drawn from the river had lost a worrisome amount of blood, but late in the night they had been able to stop the bleeding. Kyle saw the hand, knew it likely to be the result of a bullet rather than a burn. He had also noted the bag strapped snugly across his chest and kept as securely in place as if it had been stitched. The man had regained consciousness while Orlynne watched over him but he had not spoken other than to thank them for the help. When Kyle paddled up to a place where they could take out, they dragged the boat up on the grass. While Orlynne stayed behind, Kyle and Laura went up to the road to flag down a passing vehicle.
“I wonder what he’s carrying in that bag,” Laura said once they were out of earshot.
“I imagine I have a pretty good idea. A man doesn’t hold on to something at the risk of his own life unless it means the whole world to him.”
“Aren’t you curious to see, though?”
A pickup rounded the corner and its headlights came on through the dissipating smoke. Kyle lifted his hand to draw the driver’s attention.
“Whatever it is, he’s earned it. Maybe he’ll even prove to be worth whatever it is he thinks it can do for him.”
After the driver got out and helped them bring the boat and the rest of their party back up, they headed for the hospital. Kyle tried to get Orlynne to sit in the cab, but she insisted in riding in the bed beside the injured man. It was a warm morning, she said. Warm as a bath.
As they rode, the driver told them what he’d heard, though much was still caught up in the wild growth of rumor. Several thousand acres burned. Upwards of five hundred homes lost. The fires were still burning in the east, but they had diminished through the course of the night. They were expected to be contained within the next twenty-four hours. There was loss of life, yes, though the numbers conflicted. No one yet could say what had been the cause, only that it wrecked the county, made people understand what ruin and disaster truly was.
Once they got to the hospital, the injured man thanked him, told him his name was Jay. He said he wanted him to know that. Kyle couldn’
t say why this was important to the man, though it did seem to have been stated with gratitude. Kyle asked if there was anything he’d like him to ask the nurses for.
“I’d like a telephone. I need to make a call to Knoxville,” he said.
Kyle told him that he would make sure they brought him one as soon as they could.
After he talked to the nurses, Kyle went out to the soda machine room and made some calls. Booked a room for Orlynne and one for Laura and him at a place in Johnson City. He tried to get in touch with Frank Farmer, but the line was busy, so he called for a cab to take them to the hotel.
After they checked in and saw Orlynne taken care of, he and Laura went down and shut themselves in their room, shucked their shoes and filthy clothes and showered together as long as the hot water lasted. They climbed naked into the bed and slept until late that afternoon when the phone woke them.
“Yeah?”
“You’re alive.”
“I am. Hey, Frank.”
“I’ve been calling all around to run down as many people as I can.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a real good idea.”
“Can you get into town?”
“I can get a cab.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ll come out and get you.”
“Okay. Half an hour?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Hey?”
“Yeah?”
“You got any spare clothes I can borrow off you?”
“Yeah, I’ll swing by the house.”
When Frank got there, Laura met him at the door wrapped in a blanket, made a joke about a casual dress code. Frank apologized, said he should have thought to bring something for her as well. She said she’d take a gift card to Marshall’s on the county and he told her he’d see what he could do, smiling.
Kyle dressed in the bathroom and went out with Frank, told Laura he’d bring back something to eat.
How Fire Runs Page 26