The Fire Within

He remembered his first pocket lighter. It was emblazoned with the colorful dancing bears of the Grateful Dead.

His father stumbled in from the great bonfire raging across the street at the Henleys' and found him on the kitchen floor, petting his imaginary cat, Tofu. His father’s face was ruddy and languorous, his eyes pinholes. Thomas exhaled, and his father’s head swung from the lighted cavern of the fridge to the dark corner where he sat, clutching Tofu, stupefied. His father's fingers closed decidedly around a Bud Light and the door of the fridge swung shut, plunging the room in semi-darkness.

“Whutchuh doin’ ‘n ‘ere, bud? Erryone’s ousside,” Thomas’s father asked, each word dissolving into the next.

Thomas tossed Tofu onto the floor, and to prove his nonchalance, stood up. “Sorry Pa, jus’ came in for a glass a’ water,” he mumbled. His eyes flitted downward and came to rest on a stain on the hardwood floor. In the dimness, it resembled a dragon.

Pa slammed his beer on the counter, slopping liquid down the sides. “Look a’ me, boy, when I’mmuh talkin’ t’yuh!” he demanded. “Some gawdamn respec ‘sall!”

Father and son faced each other, wide-eyed for their own reasons, and in the space of several heartbeats Pa forgot about his anger and felt sorry. He sighed deeply, belched, and plunged his calloused hands into his ratted Carhartt, emerging with a lighter and a rolled joint.

“Here yuh go, Tommy boy,” he said, extending the objects to Thomas. “Give ‘er uh light. Yuh can thank me later.” He threw back his head and howled at the ceiling.

Thomas hesitated, afraid.

“Take ‘em! ‘For I lose my fuggin patience with yuh!” Pa practically hollered, and so Thomas took the items daintily, eyes downcast. Tofu hissed and arched his back in defiance, but of course, Pa didn’t notice.

“Thanks Pa,” Thomas mouthed, his voice diffusing like steam before it could become audible.

Pa had just remembered his beer and thus forgotten about Thomas. Running one huge hand through his sweaty hair, he grabbed the drink with the other and made towards the sliding door and the swollen fire beyond.

Thomas was left alone with his father’s lighter and a joint, adult objects that tingled with alien poignance in his tiny palms. Cautiously, he stepped into the darkness of summer’s cloistered, palpitating heart and was instantly enveloped in the oscillating song of crickets.

He’d seen people—his Pa among them—get high before. They mostly sat on the couch and giggled. It couldn’t be so bad. Tofu purred encouragement and wound in between his legs, tapping Thomas’s right calf softly with the black tip of his white tail.

Few technologies have forged the human narrative to the degree of fire, in both catastrophe and domestication. In harnessing the flames, we made ours the sovereign province of unending light and warmth. Nourished by meat cooked over campfires, the brains of our primate predecessors complexified over millennia until they became our brains. Fire humanized the brain and birthed the mind; we are thus intimately, biologically bound to the flames. Even small children who stare into the campfire feel a connection one part wary, another part wonderstruck. Predating fire’s myriad powers to cook, illuminate, forge, smelt, signal, propel, and cremate is its ability to awe.

Thomas was not thinking of his biological legacy as he puzzled over the lighter. But he would return in thought to the matter of legacy, destiny, and this moment many years later.

He pushed the lighter’s lever—nothing. He tried again, and again. He noted the sparkwheel and tried rotating it. No flame. Finally, he thumbed the wheel and pressed the lever in quick succession, and suddenly held a little flame in his hand, sustained by butane piped up from the lighter’s bowels.

He was transported. He felt as though he’d painted an object that had leapt from the canvas. As it wavered, the flame seemed to parallel something in him, fragile and also violent, equally poised to extinguish or combust. Thomas thought of the candles around the alter at Sunday mass and the bonfire raging across the street. These fires were personal now—less like décor and more like breathing things—straining, combative, and fatally misunderstood.

He lit the joint, and instead of smoking it like he’d seen the adults doing, he let the fire consume it end to end, until all that remained were smoldering ashes on the patio.

* * *

“We’ve gotta new hot spot to worry ‘bout: that western bit by Cascade Locks,” Mikey announced, pushing a mug across the table. “We evac’d another two families outta the area ‘round midnight and set some scratch lines ‘round the structures. Hot shot crew’s on the way over.” He paused, sipping from his own mug: coffee and whiskey. “Eastern line’s at eighty percent containment, but she’s been givin’ the boys hell all night. We’ve got retardant in the air right now headed that way.”

Trent pressed his fingers to his temples and inhaled deeply. Dark conifer forest enclosed the station office, scattering dawn’s first light. Only the glow of a monitor illuminated the soot-streaked, crevassed faces of the two men. On the digital map, the fireline advanced soundlessly—acres of scorched forest collapsed into colorful, pixel-length migrations.

“We’ve got forty volunteers arriving in fifteen minutes,” Mikey reminded him.

Trent remained silent, but Mikey knew his mind was parsing through the machinations of the fire, probing for weaknesses. Trent had an almost transcendental intuition of the vagaries of wildfire that was respected by the whole department.

Trent stood, shaking away the seed of a memory, and grabbed his bunker gear. “Let’s go fight a fire,” he murmured.

* * *

Thomas adored the wonderous noisiness of a good fire, as sporadic hisses became hysteria. Standing before his larger fires, he could sense them breathing; he inhaled with them, lungs burning.

He'd started with cardboard boxes he'd found discarded outside the packing factory, but the cops had caught him and that hadn't been a good night at home. Pa took the policeman's advice to heart and disciplined his errant son with the blunt end of his Bud Light. After that, Thomas learned discretion and cunning. Through middle school, he rode his bike after class to the abandoned spaces of the Colombia River Gorge, the homeless camps and the shabby cabins sunk halfway into the forest. He coaxed his flames over grime-stained mattresses, across fallen and rotted beams, through generations of forgotten filth. Once, he was attacked by a bum, manic at the sight of the fireball that was his life's possessions, wrapped up in a tarp, burning to ashes in a shopping cart. He escaped charges in each of these episodes thanks in part to the bike, which permitted rapid getaways, and largely, the forsaken locales of his arsons. In the most despairing corners of the county, the cops were slow to come, if they came at all.

On a fall afternoon, Thomas set fire to the high school sports field. He watched the progress from the bleachers, as if it were a football game; when the smoke began to drift through the goalpost, he hurried to his truck across the green. If he were expelled, his father would certainly boot him from the trailer for good. He hated the morose, sage green, sagging double-wide, but it was the only roof in the world he’d ever slept under. He hated the yeast smell of his father’s breath. He hated how he couldn’t bring himself to raise his fists when his father stumbled towards him, forehead beet-red, with the business end of a bottle.

* * *

The sun never rose on the late August day. Trent and his crew labored in a sickly stew of grey smoke. The minutes were marked by the endless metronome of the men rearing up, pulaskis raised, and striking down at the spongy duff in numb rhythm. They arranged the skeleton trunks of felled trees in a funeral pyre and set the fuel alight. The whine of chainsaws reverberated like a dirge in the empty space where mature ponderosa once stood.

At midday, Mikey swung up in a company truck and handed Trent a clipboard with reports from the fire’s western front.

“Wind’s drivin’ it northward, towards the Bowen Trailer Park,” he relayed. “We’ve got everyone out of the area except an older lady, Annie Mappuck. She refuses to leave.”

Trent looked up from the clipboard. “Mappuck? Get her outta there. Carry her out if you’ve gotta,” he barked.

“She’s tied herself to the toilet,” Mikey replied. He allowed himself a chuckle. “Says she stayed put in the Bull Run fire in the eighties, and she ain’t leavin’ now.”

Trent was unusually quiet, grinding the toe of his boot into the ground. “Get her the hell outta there,” he said softly.

“I think she needs a visit from the Incident Commander,” Mike responded. “Talk some sense into her. We’ve got time.”

Trent nodded and handed Mikey the clipboard. “I’m on my way. You’re in charge of this squad ‘til I’m back.”

Mikey flashed a thumbs up. “Be gentle. I think she lost a kid in Bull Run. Maybe you can convince her that stayin’ ain’t worth two Mappucks burned alive.”

* * *

“Hey Mappuck—duck!” Thomas hollered. A second later, a firework whizzed over the top of Walter’s head, exploding in the hemlocks lining the clearing.

The boys cackled, and Thomas thought eagerly of his next trick. Delicately, he pulled an object wrapped in brown paper from his bag, rocking it as a mother would an infant.

Walter snorted. “Who’s the father?”

“This here,” Thomas cooed, “is the love-child of gasoline and motor oil. Plus a little dish soap and nail polish remover. All sold with a smile from your local Tum-a-Lum.”

Thomas removed the brown paper, revealing his homemade Molotov cocktail.

Walter whistled. “Damn, McClain. Is that Wild Turkey?”

“You bet. Premium bourbon whiskey. Courtesy of the old man, free of charge. The bottle, that is, not the booze,” Thomas replied.

They both laughed at that. The sun was beginning to set, and the ferns cast outsized, haphazard shadows over a carpet of spruce needles. The clearing was strewn with the detritus of frequent delinquency: spent fireworks, crushed Miller Lites, and shotgun shells. At the edge of the clearing, purple stalks of lupine quivered in the down-valley breeze.

"Get a load of this, Mappuck." Thomas flicked the lighter—the dancing bears, reserved for special burns—to the wick of the Molotov cocktail. Fire erupted instantly on the glass. Thomas closed his eyes, hucked the bottle into the woods, and let out a savage cry that resembled a scream.

The bottle exploded on impact with the trunk of an oak and flames cartwheeled outward, bathing the tree and surrounding vegetation. Tendrils of fire expanded and then puttered weakly, disappearing altogether. Disappointed, Thomas turned to Walter, shrugging.

But the flames had danced over the edge between existence and nonexistence. Baked by the late summer sun, the forest’s twinflower and swordferns were easy targets for pyrolysis. As their cellulose crumpled to gas, flames reemerged from the understory and grappled with avarice for the trunks of the Douglas fir and Western hemlock. Walter and Thomas ogled as a small fire spread across the underbrush. Flames began to ascend the trees with nightmarish efficiency. As the moss burned, black smoke filled the clearing.

Walter clenched Thomas’s shoulder, yanking him backwards. “Holy shit, dude,” he breathed. “We’ve gotta get outta here.”

But Thomas was rooted in place, at the total volition of the fire as it swelled, transmuting wood to ash.

“Thomas—come on! Let’s go!” Walter wailed, and with that, turned on his heel and staggered into the woods.

With Walter gone, the only sound was the simmering of the hemlocks as moisture bled from their trunks. Transfixed, Thomas spread his forearms towards the nearest blaze, willing them to withstand the heat. He yelped when sparks alighted on his wrists, dancing across the skin and igniting. He dropped to the dirt, smearing his searing flesh across the forest floor. He looked up; through his tears, he saw a crimson column of inferno envelope a dead fir tree, shooting to the very top and unfurling into the night sky. The fire had summited the canopy, tickling the bottom of the heavens.

Something ruptured in Thomas. This fire was not his; these flames were subordinate to no man and subject only to the laws of physics.

This type of fire predates humankind and will surely outlive it.

Thomas felt no kinship towards these flames, only a stark, primal urge to flee. He obeyed, crashing wildly through the undergrowth. Trapped by the thick foliage, smoke suffused the air, turning the forest into an opaque, toxic labyrinth.

Thomas stumbled blindly through a dense thicket of Oregon grape and tripped over a stone, falling to the earth. He stood and struggled on towards where he believed Walter's Civic to be parked, a half mile south of the clearing. After agonizing minutes of slow progress through the thick vegetation and warped topography, he stumbled down a ravine and landed in a shallow, moss-lined stream.

Bull Run Creek! he thought excitedly.

Following the flow of water upstream, Thomas half-jogged, half-crawled up the creek-bed, hopping downed trees and skittering over wet pebbles. By degrees, the air cleared and lost its acid tang. Thomas quickened his pace as the creek doglegged to the right and a dirt road became visible parallel to the rush of water. Walter’s aging Honda Civic was still parked near Bowen Bridge, but Walter himself was nowhere in sight.

Thomas clambered up the embankment and sprinted to the car, wrenching open the driver’s side door and seizing the keys on the dashboard. From this vantage point, above the elevation of the clearing, Thomas glimpsed the outline of miles of dark, dense conifer forest. Rather than burning in one bright conflagration, the landscape was a patchwork of flames. A stiff, ocean-born wind shot like a bullet down the barrel of the Colombia River Gorge and stoked the nascent fire. Smoke congressed over the treetops and spooled eastward in great gossamer tufts. It would not be long before flames crested the slope and engulfed Bowen Bridge.

Thomas thumbed the keys, moving them towards the ignition, and hesitated. Cursing, he dropped them onto the seat and clambered atop the hood of the Civic.

“Walt! WALTER!” he cried, voice cracking.

Ominous crackling issued from the north, harbinger of the approaching maelstrom.

“Walt—damn it—WALT!”

Thomas pounded on the hood of the car, howling. Hesitating for a moment, he jumped down, and leaving the keys on the passenger seat, took off sprinting across Bowen Bridge, following the gravel track of Bull Run Road. His heartbeat sluiced through his ruined forearms as he ran and ran. If fire once humanized the mind, here it had the opposite effect; Thomas fled without thought, animalistic, carnal fear alone driving his legs on and on.

* * *

As Trent sped west on a jigsaw puzzle of Forest Service roads, he felt malcontent bud in his mind like a malignant mold. He focused on Marcy, his wife, as he often did to cut through the intrusions.

Marcy, the only person he’d ever let see him cry. She’d escaped her own rural demons, fleeing as far as Sarah Lawrence in New York, where she joined an artists’ guild and painted a series of wildflower watercolors that she arranged in their apartment: lupine above the oven, Indian paintbrush in the bathroom, and cascade lilies on the bookshelf. They’d met at an environmental conference and spent the evening shyly trading facts about the old-growth rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. They discovered that they’d grown up not an hour apart, in parallel valleys of northwest Oregon.

They were married in the Catskills, which reminded both of them of Oregon and ultimately drove them back west to the place from whence they fled. They realized the world was full of people running—running east, running west, running out of time. They didn’t want to run anymore.

He told her about his father—how he sometimes came home ecstatic, sometimes glum, sometimes foaming mad, but invariably drunk. She ran her fingertips over the warped, winding burn scars on his forearms and kissed them. It was then that he cried, and she kissed his tears, too.

He channeled a degree in natural resources into a career in wildland fire management, rising quickly through the department by virtue of his uncanny aptitude for fire science and Marcy’s banana bread muffins, which he brought daily to the station. Trent was adamant—almost obsessive—about preventing massive, destructive wildfires by way of controlled burns. He went to great lengths to protect population centers. In the off season, when most of his crew found work elsewhere or took vacations, Trent studied snowfall data and prepared for the upcoming summer.

Trent and Marcy bought land above Marble Canyon with a view of the old Bull Run burn scar and the expansive pear orchards of the valley. No children, they’d decided. Instead, they bought chickens and ate scrambled eggs every morning. In this small way, they’d sutured the scars of the past and folded the hurt in the warmth of love.

But now Trent felt weak and overwhelmed. He tried to call Marcy on his cell, but the service was spotty in the woods. Instead, he listened to voices crackle on his radio, noting containment progress on all fronts.

It took almost an hour to skirt the flank of the fire, which burned out of sight but omnipresent as an unfurling of smoke from the conifers. As he pulled into the trailer park and leapt from the truck, he scented rubber burning. The fire must have moved rapidly, gobbling hundreds of acres to pull it within striking range of the neighborhood.

A pair of firefighters burst from the nearest trailer, carrying a wizened woman wearing a shirtdress and flipflops. Annie Mappuck shrieked, her legs pedaling in midair as the men deposited her gently on her lawn. A rope cinched her waist, one severed end dangling where the firefighters had sliced it from its hitch around the toilet.

Trent rushed over. One of the men released Annie and nodded swiftly at Trent.

“Fire’s jumped the break and’s just below the hill,” he stammered. “We couldn’t leave her.”

Trent grabbed the man’s shoulder and turned to his companion. “You’ve got a vehicle?” he asked. They nodded.

“Get out, now!” he barked. The men recoiled at the urgency of their incident commander’s order and took off at a run.

Trent turned to Annie, who stood forlornly in the grass, her wail reduced to a whimper. He approached the old woman gingerly, folding her trembling fingers in his strong, calloused palms.

“Annie,” he said softly. “I need you to come with me. We’re going somewhere safe.”

Annie shook her head, moaning.

Trent grabbed her arm and tugged. “Let’s get you out of here,” he urged. Still the old woman resisted.

Trent turned Annie to stare her straight in the eyes. His calm demeanor was unraveling. “No more Mappucks dead!” he shouted at her suddenly.

“Yuh don’ unnerstand…I ken’t leave ‘thowt muh Maggie,” she croaked.

“You mean someone else lives in this home?” Trent questioned. Annie shook her head and began to reply when a rumble splintered the air and a second later, the singed body of a tree whistled through the smoke, crashing through the top of Annie’s trailer and crumpling it like a beer can. A wave of sparks thrown from the trunk temporarily blinded Trent and he stumbled backwards, tripping over a garden hose. He hacked and rubbed his eyes to clear them. Annie was nowhere in sight. He swiveled madly and spotted her shuffling towards the woods behind the trailer.

He cursed and lunged after her, but the ancient woman scuttled with surprising vigor into the smoking trees, flipflops swishing. He lost her in a blur of tears as the haze swirled around his eyes. Swearing, he thought longingly of his face shield and breathing apparatus on the seat in the truck. Then fire erupted from everywhere, seeming to spout from the sky, discharge from the outstretched limbs of trees, and even ooze from the ground underfoot. Trent was trapped in the nucleus of an inferno. He heard a meow and looked down; at his feet trembled a small black and white cat. Acting on impulse, Trent grabbed the cat and pelted through a wall of flames, collapsing after several strides at the insistence of his stinging chest.

He saw the flames rise up around him and accepted it as so. He felt the searing heat fade to gentle warmth, and then he felt nothing at all.

Trent came to under a canopy of stormclouds. Sunlight wormed through the clog at a low angle—many hours had passed. Behind him, the blackened husk of the trailer smoldered in the dying light. Scorched forest encircled the patch of lawn on which Trent sprawled, but each blade of the lawn’s grass glowed vigorously green, untouched by the flames. Beads of water sparkled in the turf, and as Trent touched his own sopping clothes, he realized that the lawn’s sprinklers had worked a miracle.

As if summoned by this realization, Annie Mappuck came shuffling out from a copse of charred hemlocks, wholly uninjured, hair akimbo and eyes shot through with incredulity. Her white dress billowed around her thin frame; her flipflops clopped through a fine humus of charcoal.

“Yuh’ve saved muh Maggie!” she hollered.

“Huh?” Trent could hardly coax the lonely syllable from his raw throat. He looked down; tensed in fear but otherwise unharmed, the cat breathed in his arms, her heartbeat ticking against his wrist.

“Maggie! Yuh’ve saved muh Maggie!” Annie cried, reaching for the cat. Ash billowed in a cloud around her feet as she moved towards him.

Trent’s eyes were pained and unfocused. Annie was a pinpoint of faraway light from the mouth of a long tunnel.

“Thomas,” he croaked suddenly.

“What?”

“I’m Thomas,” Trent said again, voice cracking. “It’s me…Thomas McClain. Thomas!”

“Oh!” Annie’s eyes clouded with confusion. She strained through the veil of time and latched to something deep in the past. “Thomas?”

Thirty years ago, when the Bull Run Fire swept through the Colombia River Gorge, just one casualty was recorded. Two hundred thousand acres of forest, a dozen structures, and hundreds of livestock went up in smoke. Investigators concluded that the wildfire was initiated by its sole human victim, Walter Mappuck—to some, a tragedy, to others, justice served.

Trent heard Walter’s wails echo in his mind and felt the heat of the fire that seared the memory into the deepest plane of his conscious. He rubbed his forearms and shivered.

“Walt…he’s gone because of me. That was my fire…” Trent whispered.

Annie stared, uncomprehending. She tried to wrench the cat from Trent again and he relented. Maggie, now limp with shock, slumped like a rag doll in her grip.

“It was my fault,” he repeated. “Walt’s death was my fault.”

A fire purges life from the earth’s surface, but in so doing, makes ripe the ground for new life. Trent felt the truth rip through him, breaking free the dam between past and present. Annie Mappuck stood in front of him, alive, with the first shadow of understanding darkening her face.

In his mind, Trent heard the crack of a million bottle bombs exploding, and a string of grinning, colorful bears marched across his field of vision, high-stepping in unison to the drunk vibrato of crickets. He was overcome by an agonizing shame, yet in the undertow, he sensed an upwelling of renewal. Thomas spread his arms wide, parted his lips, and tasted the bitter air. He felt like scorched earth: razed, wasted. He thought only of wildflowers, Marcy's watercolor wildflowers, the blooming ephemerals that are first to colonize the fire-swept world.