Ortwin came into the cookshack midway through dinner and requested twenty volunteers to fight a small forest fire in one of our blocks. When no one volunteered, he pulled out a list, read it and thanked us for our cooperation. We crammed water tanks, extra hoses, water barrels into one of the crummies and loaded ourselves, mildly excited, into the two other vehicles. There was talk of fire duty compensation, and the prospect of bonus earnings added an air of festivity to the occasion. Ortwin looked around at us.
I don’t know how it started, he said, but it was likely a cigarette.
The rising telltale smoke was first spotted by Osho, who then stayed behind with Clara and Paul to try to contain it. This was a hopeless task. The smoke was already billowing when we got there, and Osho, Paul and Clara were shiny black — ash sticking to sweat. They’d run out of water and were now futilely scrambling to dig over the earth, in some places attempting to sever, with dull axes and shovel blades, entire tree roots of potential fuel.
I thought back over that day, the rich contentment of it, our last day as I came to think of it later, the satisfying, unthinking, lush, hot end to it, the laughing bemusement of our mutterings and the way Willem’s cigarette looked as it arced and then, the friction of the air breaking its trajectory, plummeted to earth. I did not rise as I had before to press the back of my heel into the slow-burning butt. I believed, where I had never believed before, that it would consume itself and die, that it would not burn on, and that if it did, this event would be somehow separate from me, somehow none of my business, a fire out of control on a newscast inside the box of a distant television — nothing, nothing to do with me.
Osho said, Uh, Christ eh? Who’s the bastard who didn’t put his cigarette out right?
Willem looked up at me through the tangle, the unintentional dreadlock of hair that fell in braid-like mats over his cheeks. He was working madly, the aura of guilt palpable. He dug in furiously, as if single-handedly trying to put a stop to this danger that he had unwittingly unleashed. Osho had the look in his eye that killing the bear gave him, the look of a man without values, none.
You smoke? he said to Willem. Don’t you?
Yes, I smoke. It was perhaps my cigarette that will cost us the evening sleeping. I can’t say it for sure.
Was this your corridor?
I can’t say for sure. But it was; we knew it was. Our bodies had pressed into the earth here. Perhaps there was still an imprint of evidence. The fire edged toward us under the dry duff, the dusty composting needles of years ago. It surfaced every now and again, licks of flame eating the very air. We could hardly breathe. The wind, not present during the day, all but still, somehow managed to twist the smoke and fling it in every direction so we could scarcely remain clear of it long enough to take in a clean breath. The fire where the wind pushed it, along with the smoke — this was the side that we were attempting to control, spurting futile little sprays of water that sizzled into the air and seemed only to enrage the thing. How fast could the worms dig down to safety?
Look, yelled Osho, gesturing wildly at the fire as it climbed slash, the whoosh of air sucked into itself. Look. Look. What you did.
Leave him alone, Osho. If he did it, it was an accident. I stood between them.
Osho threw his shovel into the ground then and shouted, railed, screamed. He was an idealist confronting another idealist on the issue of reality.
This was not what I expected, he rasped.
The fire was swiftly edging toward us, a low, moving wall of orange and blue heat. Our trenches were hopeless, couldn’t be completed fast enough to make a bit of difference. The fire did not so much leap them as tunnel under them, finding fuel somewhere deep within the ground. Ortwin rigged a hose system up to a small swamp, and then we could at least pump water at a decent rate, try to keep the burn contained — a vessel of fire, which we hoped would exhaust its own resources and expire. I soaked a cotton rag I had torn away from my T-shirt and held it up to my face. I wheezed — the air that the fire voraciously consumed was replaced with curling smoke. Clean air had a particular sweet odour I had never before noticed. The gasping wall of smoke interfered with its pleasures. Each breath was a precious achievement, a have-not. Ortwin removed Osho, the fiery rage of him, to the swamp, where he spent his time manning the little generator that had been rigged to the pump. He had to keep moving the pump’s hose as the small swamp thickened into mud.
In the middle of that night, while the flame licked into the air, blue and red cow tongues licking the black air, cowlicks of flame, when the heat of it had become intense and almost unbearable, tears flowed down my cheeks because I was not sure I could continue to fight. It occurred to me that I might only lie down and be overtaken. It seemed somehow easier, skin rising, the heat of it comforting. Yes, it would be, eventually. It seemed a simple solution to a problem the particulars of which at that moment eluded me. At this point, I was pulled back, away from the shifting path of fire.
It was Willem, taller than I remembered him, as if suddenly he was a real person who had before been a vague figment of my imagination. Perspiration ran through his hair and down his face, and there was a swipe of black dirt over the bridge of his nose. His jeans were loose on him and barely hung around his torso, that torso that I had so recently hung around. I think I smiled at him or at least at the memory of our limbs entwined and the rush, the memory of the long rush of orgasm that pulsed at my uterus and down the conduit of my vagina. I did smile at him.
I love you, he said, then.
I’m sure I did smile at him.
He looked so sure of himself, and I wondered if that had something to do with the way I had been so overtly fighting this menace, if that had propelled him to feel something he could only describe, and aloud, as love. He had been working behind me, and through the dark and the flicker of fire, he may have caught glimpses of my bending form, the curve of my flank, the lifting, rising of my figure, which may have reminded him of us earlier in the day, which may, in turn, have reminded him of something comforting, a mothering caress of long ago, perhaps, and the urge to express that in terms all the world might understand overwhelmed him and he pulled me back and dared to say, I love you.
I can’t live without you. Come with me. I will be the honest woodcutter.
I hope I smiled. Such a kind man. Maudlin, I know, but much of life is.
No, I answered. It’s just a story. It isn’t real.
We could make it so.
This is real, I said, pointing to the fire dancing through the duff. He pushed an orange strand of hair out of my face; his face was looming at me in a way that distorted it.
No, I said. I can’t.
Why not?
It would become real, I said.
I did not know much at the time. Did not know the future, could not read it in any signs that may or may not have been evident at that time to read. I did not know that every aspect of my little hopes and dreams would become suddenly unachievable, even the infantile desire for dreams and dreaming would leave me, and that everything I knew, all this was in the process of falling away from me. I could not even imagine then how my life could unravel. Willem called me crazy-girl again and I began to half believe him. He took my arm and put it around his waist as if I was a doll he could manipulate.
Crazy, he said, I thought you liked me.
I like you, I said.
Marry me. I could stay here then. Stay in Canada. Stay in you too. Such a beautiful country.
It was a consolation to know that aspects of his feelings for me were sullied by his dream of immigration. It held the sad notion of lost opportunity in check. There was no one whose desire did not infiltrate his values. No cloth that did not stain. I felt the warm earth edging toward my boots as we kissed that last time.
Clara had been taken back to camp with a respiratory problem. We were all soot and fire-grease and sweat. Paul was panting and giggling hysterically, the cuffs of his pants charred by the flame. It was three a.m. when the last whorl of smoke evaporated into the sky. We were waiting for Ortwin to return and fetch us. The night was hot, the still-hot soil radiated an uncanny, unsettling warmth. Willem came up behind me and ran his half finger along my arm and then up the centre of my back, my spine. Osho was sitting cross-legged beside me. I was not certain whether he was awake. Then he sighed.
It will need to be replanted, he said. He was utterly worn out.
Yes, said Paul, always look on the bright side. Osho tossed a clump of debris at him. A petulant, tired gesture, no more than that.
A subtle waft of air lifted the cinders in a swirling pattern that threatened but did not overstep the landscape of the burn, a circle of ash. Upon looking here into this motion of blackened dust and air, I felt I knew some things that I had never before considered. Willem’s maimed finger up my back and the crew standing, kneeling, sitting about exhausted had a morbid weight. It was the atmosphere of nothingness, of waiting, and within it all possibility. There was a collective wonderment, all of us looking into this swirl of ash.
Ortwin eventually returned, his purple slacks luminescent in their cleanliness, in the light of the moon, and told us that the money we thought might have been earned by our noble firefighting work was not to be. He wasn’t even planning to report the fire. Apparently, the company would be fined for starting the fire if this was discovered; the contract might be entirely voided because of our carelessness. In short, he had duped us. We heard the rustle but could not see a grouse searching about for whatever she had lost. We had witnessed fire. Ortwin led us out through the night to the crummies. The gear was heavier on the way out. If we had known we were working for free, would we have bothered? Or would we have simply left the fire to rise and build into a magnificent, crackling, unquenchable debacle?
I woke up late the next day, the taste of soot lining my dry mouth. Ortwin had let the fire crew sleep in, and already the late morning sun warmed up the inside of my dome to an unbearable level. The stink of burnt dust. There were strange shadows cross-hatched on the roof of my tent — the swaying branches of trees? My sleeping bag had soaked up a pool of my grungy sweat, and my legs and arms lay wild, out, my body’s attempt to cool itself. We were given the day off to recuperate from last night’s hell, I realized. It was Ortwin’s compensation. Cheap of him, but something, at any rate. I tugged on a filthy undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts that had the fly sewn shut, and I opened the zipper door to my tent. And then I saw.
Willem was gone, and there was a parting gift which made my heart beat. The cross-hatch shadows I had noticed in my tent were formed by a web of pink tickertape wrapped around and around it. It was a plastic spider web, wound about, coddling, as a spider did its prey, my semi-spherical home. The pink web trailed off to the left of my door where it twined up his dibble shovel, dug deep into the earth. And as my eyes followed the path of this unspeakable and unspoken story, I saw into the field below me, where Osho and the rest slept on, web on web of spider traps, spun in the night by thousands upon thousands of small but real spinning spiders, all alike. Osho, Clara and Paul would come through this field or, for all I knew, had come through it already and were sitting in the cookshack, marvelling at the webs softly tickling them as they broke through.
Willem was gone, his tent, his gear too. A rectangular patch of almost dead yellow and white grass where his pup tent sat was the only proof of his existence for the couple of weeks it took the contract to run its course. Ortwin pulled me aside to tell me not to take it personally, that the ministry had started asking questions pertaining to work permits and looking at social insurance cards. Willem had neither — was in fact working on the SIN of a distant cousin, who had decided to take the summer off yet still needed the weeks to qualify for unemployment benefits — so they had decided it was better for everyone if he left quietly.
Where exactly did he go? The vague body memory of Willem inside me stirred me to ask.
Went to Toronto, I think, to fly out, home. He said something about a logging contract he could finish. Said he missed the woods anyway. I have an address for him if you want.
Missed the woods, I said. That’s funny.
I tried not to take it personally.
We, the fire crew, took a crummy into Kapuskasing for the afternoon to rent a cheap motel room and get showered and act civilized for a couple of days. The rest of the crew would show up later in the day or the next morning. Ortwin sprang for the room, which we would share and in which we would sleep marginally less comfortably than we would have had we stayed in our tents. Osho drove. It was a shoddy, wall-to-wall-carpeted room at Riverbend Motel on Highway 11, and we took turns in the shower. The water ran black. The filth that etched my skin ran in soot and earth down my chest and legs.
The rest of the afternoon we shot pool at the Kap Inn, drank slow beers and half watched a girl dance on a small plywood platform, gyrating in a particularly learned way to a tinny extended version of “Push Push in the Bush,” watched her make the sign of the cross between sets. When we got hungry, we went next door to a restaurant where once Elizabeth II sat and crumpeted, way back before my birth. We ate nicely presented burgers adorned with torn leaves of iceberg lettuce and slices of tomato imported from far away, tasteless and slightly hard.
The restaurant was essentially a huge, carpeted hall where local marriage feasts took place. It was all of a piece — the restaurant, the Kap Inn and the bar. This was the dining hall attached to the red-carpeted hotel where, years before, Karl rented a first-class room and thrust me down onto the bed. We were in the Queen’s Suite, upon the very bed where Queen Elizabeth II had lain her well-coiffed head. The bedding was slightly brittle after all those years. Karl whispered his not-sweet nothings in my ear.
I like my women a little bit masculine, he muttered. And I like my men a little bit feminine. Oh, Alma! And then, his great lank of an aging body, bones everywhere, was atop me, and I laughed in shock and horror and pushed him off. He was baffled, had obviously projected a different scenario onto this occasion — the pompous sheen of red satin, that bedspread, the rarely-used-since-1951 suite, the carpet pile worn down by regular cleanings, that unsullied room, and Karl’s hopes dashed.
You’re an idiot, Karl, I said, pulling my shirt into place.
Yes, I know that. But even idiots need a little affection once in a while.
That was when I told him to fuck off. He smiled, reached out to brush back a wisp of my hair that had fallen along my cheek and said, It would be my pleasure, darling.
July 23. It was a pestilence sent by God’s wrath, obviously. The spiders descended for a reason. I’d seen Willem leave. Ortwin’s miserable little cowboy drove him off, and I thought good riddance to bad rubbish. Cloud of golden dust, and he was gone. I geared up and sat waiting in the crummy. I had missed a fire, I heard. Slept right through a little cataclysm. More proof, of course. And I was back in the field while the rest slept in. I was racing my trees into the ground as if the very wind had befriended me. I washed carefully that night; I would see her in town the next day. Back at the Kap Inn where first we . . .
Osho, Paul, Clara and I stumbled out of the bar late, stood mesmerized in the parking lot. Across the Kapuskasing River the pulp mill was a sight to behold, Spruce Falls all lit up, spewing a thick cloud of sour, yeasty-smelling smoke from its stacks. It was the year of the hundred millionth planted tree. The mill was celebrating. The yellow and grey clouds of exhaust undulated in patterns, smoke divination. I was drunk, the lights were blurred by my skewed vision, my swaying body. I was in awe of this beauty. Clara coughed. The smoke of the previous day had affected her lungs, and in coughing, she broke my reverie.
Lovely industry, said Paul. Really marvellous.
What?
Osho brought us back to the motel, concentrating hard to keep the crummy in a straight line. And I fell asleep, the memory of fire licking air lulled me, in a bed with Clara, although when I woke up she was nestled with Paul on the other bed. Osho slept in the bathtub. They said I was thrashing but I remembered nothing, only the green baize of the pool table and the clack of ball on ball — a repeating dream of no importance.