The Firebug of Mount Usakam
Harrison Kim
At the party, Matt touched a girl’s hair. She sat beside him, both their backs against the wall. The chestnut-coloured hair shone silky, fell in a patchouli scent over her shoulders. He breathed deeply and stroked the tresses. He’d taken a hit of acid earlier and each stroke lasted a long time.
“What are you doing?” The girl jumped up, swayed to one side.
Matt pulled his lighter out. He lifted it above his head, flicked it a couple of times.
“How do you like my flame?” he said. “I can summon the past, present, and future!”
“Get out!” said the girl. “Who the hell invited you?”
“I’m not hurting anybody,” Matt said. “Check out these guns.”
He stuck out his arm and made a fist. His biceps popped out the edge of his T shirt.
“You’re not in reality, man!” someone yelled. “You’re on steroids.”
Matt pulled his shirt up past his navel and staggered out, sweeping a bottle off a table on his way. He liked the sound of glass crashing to the floor, and the screeches from the teenagers behind him.
“Those people don’t understand me,” he told Mom the next morning, as he shoved log after log into the trailer’s blazing wood stove.
“I think that’s enough fuel,” Mom said. “It’s summertime.” She flipped a few fried eggs. “I’m going to move out of here,” she told him. “There’s the mushroom farm next door stinking up the place, and of course Daddy’s gone.”
Matt stared into the flames.
“Sometimes I see faces in there,” he said. He stared closer. “I met a chick at that party.”
“I told you to stay away from parties,” Mom told him.
Her hands shook as she pushed some plates into the top shelf.
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” Matt told her. He peered into the spaces between the logs. “I sure would like to check out that chick’s face in this fire.”
“It’s too hot,” said Mom. “I’d ask you to open a window but there’s that mushroom stench.”
“Yeah,” said Matt. He lifted his head. “You’re always talking about it.”
“That farmer’s a wicked man,” said Mom.
Matt slammed the stove door shut, slid into his built-on annex at the side of the trailer, where he played at being a radio announcer.
“This is CKIX first station on the dial,” he declared. “The weather today looks hot and dry, so parents, make sure your kids don’t play with matches.”
He gazed at his big green eyes and full mouth in the side mirror. Girls liked his looks, but then he grinned with that mouth, and they jumped back. Matt paced up and down in the trailer, formally announcing each song he spun on his vintage record player.
“Be careful and sensitive when you listen to the past,” he said. “That’s another day, another show folks.”
He pulled out his extensive set of weights, heaved them from side to side, practiced curls, a hundred reps each. He lay on his back and lifted fifty.
“Be careful,” he repeated with each push. The room spun large around him.
He took twenty minutes to re-stack the weights, placing each one back in its proper place, wiping off the sweat with a towel. He folded the cloth, pushed his way out the door, strode towards his rusted pickup truck. He stopped, turned up the hill a moment, and peered down the six-foot-deep foxhole he’d been digging there for the past week.
“Nice excavation,” he said.
He caught a glimpse of Mom staring out at him, the red laundry basket in her hands.
He jumped in the car and started up the engine. There was always a fire in there he could push faster. He couldn’t look inside, but he knew there were faces dancing in the pistons, faces that appeared in all flame. He’d been a little kid when he first saw the images. They rose, appearing and disappearing on the current of an aroma rising from an open container in the old farm barn. They didn’t look like anyone, they changed too fast, but he caught glimpses.
“Is that you, Daddy?” he’d said, and walked towards the scent, stood over the jerry can, watched his tiny hands grab the spout. Then he breathed deeply of the sweetness.
When he turned around, the tractor was talking to him.
“Matt,” it said, “Daddy told you not to sniff gasoline.”
Matt knew what his dad told him. He always loved his dad. Daddy bounced him on his knee in front of the campfire and Matt’s favorite memory was feeling Daddy’s arms around him while he watched the glowing coals redden and blacken, hiss and spit. He recalled all the little animals and insects he saw in there, rising and falling with the smoke and ashes, as Daddy laughed and smoked his doobie cigarette, the red end glowing.
Daddy was dead of a stroke now, not three months ago.
“I’m scared,” he told Mom just after the funeral. “Daddy’s gone.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said, “Without your father here.”
“I’m going to be a fireman,” he told her, and he started lifting weights the next day, in preparation for the volunteer exam.
Now, after his weight session, he drove his pickup to The Tumbleweed Pub, jumped out and adjusted his belt. He checked his collar in the side mirror. He preferred button-down shirts and ironed pants, he ironed all Mom’s stuff too, since Daddy’s passing. It was great to see the cracks and flaws straighten under the heat. In the pub, a few fortyish guys in tight-fitting pants sat around drinking beer. One of them was Ogden Hume, the mushroom farmer from down the hill.
“Hey, Matt!” Hume said. “You’re looking mighty fine. Coming in from the heat?”
“Yeah, Hume,” Matt answered. “I need a cool one.”
He sat and the two of them drank.
“You’ve trained yourself well,” Hume noted. “You should be able to pass that volunteer firefighter test.”
“I can haul a firehose a hundred feet in less than twenty seconds,” Matt said.
“That’s impressive,” said Hume. “A blaze in town destroyed a garage this morning,” he continued. “A bunch of teens were partying in the house right beside it at the time.”
“Spark hazard’s pretty high these days,” said Matt.
Hume nodded, turned to look as some young guys burst through the door, all in different coloured shirts. Matt reached over, dropped a hit of acid into the distracted farmer’s beer.
“You’re gonna have a good time tonight,” he said, as Hume quaffed a large swallow. “You know what I want?” he asked.
“What do you want, son?”
“I want people to see the world like I do.”
“Your youth is merely a flicker,” said Hume. “Best to burn it up and not worry so much.”
“My Mom says she’s gonna move,” said Matt. “She doesn’t like the stench from your mushroom farm.”
“Well,” said Hume, “Cody and I bought the property off you guys, then you settled next door. You could’ve lived anywhere.”
“Enjoy your beer,” Matt said.
He stood up, grinned with his huge mouth spread, then leaped out the door and into his truck, fired it up and circled out over the new subdivision above the town. He looked through the distance at Hume’s farm on the side of Mount Usakam, the farm that was once his family’s place. He folded his fingers to his palms like tiny telescopes and held them to his eyes to view the barn where he’d first sniffed the gasoline, where Daddy held him on his knee all those years ago.
“I sure would like to touch that chestnut haired girl again,” he said out loud.
He drove past the newer homes, by the still-smouldering garage. The brand-new town fire truck sat there with the hose on top trained at the ashes. Matt parked his vehicle and walked over.
“Does it look like arson?” he asked the fireman, who stood watching the water, wiping the back of his neck with a wet towel.
“With these situations, its usually compressed oily rags that catch alight,” the fireman said. “I guess there’ll be an investigation.”
“Yeah, those things can burn,” Matt nodded. “Lucky the house didn’t go too.”
He wondered if the girl was home. Funny thing was, now he couldn’t remember her face, just her hair, the tumbling tresses like the leaves protecting the trees bending in the wind all up Mount Usakam.
“We sure so need some rain,” said the fireman.
“Yeah,” Matt said, and paced back to his truck.
He almost reached it when a girl came walking the other way. She wore a floppy hat, and a white tank top that began above her navel and went up.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night. I was a little drunk.”
“Do I know you?” she said, raising her hat.
“Oh,” he said. “The one I’m looking for has chestnut hair.”
He jumped in the truck, opened all the windows and turned on the radio.
“That DJ’s got no depth,” he noted. “I could replace him in a second.”
He turned the volume down, dropped his last hit of acid and began practicing with his resonant voice. “Hey, everyone, it’s Matt Cloutier from CKIX, bringing you all the hits from the hills.”
When he got back to the trailer the sun was going down and the air stank like dead fish. He heard Mom on the phone to brother Jerry the real estate agent. She said “So you think I can get eighty thousand? But what about Matt?”
He breathed in another deep gout of the mushroom stench, then walked up the hill carrying a small canister, hearing the dry branches crackle underfoot. Dust rose at every step. When he arrived at the foxhole, he gathered branches and small logs and threw them in. He poured down the contents of the canister, then threw a piece of birchbark.
“Whoosh,” he said, as the fire caught, and the flames exploded.
He lay down at the edge of the hole to watch, shielding his face from the smoke.
“This is the safest way to burn in extreme conditions,” he told himself.
He peered at the flames, imaged Ogden Hume’s face flickering away, then his mom’s visage, her clear blue eyes like sea glass.
“Yeah, anything compressed can catch,” he thought, thinking of the fireman and his oily rags combustion theory.
A pressure started in his own mind.
“That fucking mushroom farm,” he said, as the smoke rose.
He covered the hole with branches and jogged back towards the trailer in the semi-darkness. A police car idled outside.
“Do I smell burning?” the tiny female officer yelled from the car window.
“Could be. There’s a lot of odd stuff going on around here,” said Matt.
“We’re looking for your neighbor, Ogden Hume.”
The officer pressed some buttons on her on-board computer.
Mom stood on the porch, hands on her hips.
“What bylaw has he broken now?”
“His partner reported he went screaming up the mountain.”
“Haven’t seen him,” Matt said, but then again maybe he had caught a glimpse, in the flames.
The officer wasn’t bad looking.
“I’ll sweep through the fields,” he grinned.
He crossed the gravel road, rolled under a barbed wire fence then stood tall on the other side, peeled off his T shirt and swung his shoulders for effect, then jogged towards the mushroom farm. He’d hiked through these fields all through boyhood, his mind full of gasoline fantasies. The trees bowed down to him, and the thistles and wild rose bushes flattened ahead of his steps, to allow him safe passage. He let his fingers dangle and touch the tips of the tall grass. It was like walking through a field of girl hair.
“Simple nature understands,” Matt told himself. “She knows who I am.”
As he ran, he felt every step imprint in the dirt, he inhaled the dry dusk breeze and caught once more the fishy scent of the farm. He leaped down a slope and into Ogden’s driveway, bolted up the road to the old barn. Ogden had built quite a few new buildings for his mushrooms, but the barn stood as it always had, with its wooden silo leaning.
“He left this one out,” Matt thought, and strode in.
The old tractor still loomed in one corner, how could that be? He stared harder, thought he saw a glimpse, as if behind a curtain. A small child stood with its arms raised, mouth in a huge grin. As Matt stared, the child’s arms moved up and down, like a bat, or a bird’s. Then the image disappeared. Matt ran forward, pulled out his lighter and flicked it at the old straw where the child was.
“What goes around comes around,” he said, as the flames caught, and his own shadow vanished behind the sparking. He turned and bolted out, without looking back. He seemed invisible, sheltered by this alteration in time.
“No one’s going to drive Mom out,” he said, scuttling up the other side of the hill towards Mount Usakam.
He didn’t stop running for a while. As he circled around to the darkened trailer, he heard sirens. When he looked down big black smoke rose from the mushroom farm, into the maw of the night. Within that smoke, flames shot up. Matt imagined his own face rising. He pictured his profile as a child, then as a teenager and adult, he thought of his reflection in a mirror, then checked the fire again.
“That place is part of me too,” he said, inhaling the smoky air as he ran along the old deer trails to the trailer.
Down below, he noticed firefighters with flashlights on their heads scurrying about, and water arcing into the night.
“Hope they have protective gear,” Matt told Mom. “I’m gonna wet the trailer roof down.”
He turned on the outside tap, pulled the garden hose to the ladder and climbed, stood on the trailer top, where he had a commanding view of the sunset valley. He sprayed for a long time. He liked the way the water flow cascaded off the sides.
He heard a pounding on the hill above, someone running, breaking branches. A clear cry rang out, followed by several muffled ones. Matt scrambled off the roof. He filled two watering cans and zig-zagged up the hill towards the foxhole. He looked up to see the first stars overhead.
He heard “Help!”
Someone was in the excavation all right, lucky there didn’t seem to be much smoke rising. He lowered himself to the edge, lay prone, and peered over.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I fell in this fucking firehole!”
Ogden Hume leaned against one side, holding his knees.
“Stand up and I’ll help you out,” Matt said.
It wouldn’t be easy to lift the farmer, but Matt imagined pulling weights, squatted down and squeezed hard under the man’s arms. He stared straight into Ogden’s grime streaked and cut up face as the farmer’s biceps heaved.
“What a memorable moment,” Matt grinned. “A glimpse of closeness.”
“Just get me out of here,” Ogden yelled, and wriggled from his grasp.
Matt breathed in the air around the farmer, “got that aroma captured,” he thought, as Ogden struggled out of the hole.
Matt emptied one watering can round the edges of the opening and poured the contents of the other straight down into it.
“Safety first,” Matt said. He looked at Ogden. “You’re all scratched.”
“Something happened to me after I left that pub today. I wasn’t even that drunk. Then I fell in this burning bear trap.”
“Yeah, well, I think you might have done some things you regret,” Matt said. “Then again, most of us have.”
“What’s that smell?” said Ogden.
“It’s your farm burning,” Matt told him. “Just like that trap.”
“Holy shit.”
The farmer stumbled down the hill, Matt zigzagging behind him with the empty cans.
“I was watering my roof,” Matt called. “And saw the smoke from the farm. It looked like your head, actually, rising from the trees.”
Pat Wuori, the neighbor, pulled into the yard as they reached the trailer.
“We’re checking for any igniting sparks,” she said.
“I’ve got Ogden Hume here,” Matt announced. “Can you take him back to his place, I mean, what’s left of it?”
“Wow, you found Mr. Hume!” Pat pushed her black hair out of her eyes and Matt thought it was too bad she was married. “His friend Cody’s worried sick,” she said.
Hume let out a groan as he gazed into the valley. A siren sounded, then stopped, then started again. Mom stood in flip flops and Daddy’s red T-shirt that came down past her knees. She held the still-flowing hose.
“I’ll take over the watering,” Matt told her. “It’s firefighter practice.”
He thought about going with Pat to check on the course of the farm blaze, but figured the urge was only his response to the look of her hair. Anyway, there was just enough room in her truck for Ogden.
He paced up and down with the hose, soaking the underbrush between the trailer and the road, speaking out loud in his radio announcer voice.
“Good evening, listeners of CKIX radio, there’s been a big blaze tonight down at the mushroom farm. The farmer’s been found hiding in a flaming foxhole and they say he’ll be under arrest by morning. Looks like a clear case of brain fever leading to arson. Have a good evening, folks and don’t forget to thank your local firefighters.”
He stared through a gap in the trees at Mount Usakam. As he looked, his mother’s frail form appeared at the bottom of the driveway.
“I’m going to sell,” his mother called. Her voice shook. “I can’t take care of us anymore.’
She started walking down the road towards the mushroom farm.
“I can see spirits in the fire,” Matt yelled after her. “But I can’t bring Daddy back.”
He squatted atop the trailer, watching the glowing barn. The town’s yellow fire truck spurted an arc of water. The spraying sound calmed him. He lay on his back, looked straight up and viewed smoke rising towards the stars.
“How far does the past go up before it has to come down?” he wondered.
He rocked a little from side to side as the stars sparked above, then lay on his stomach, thinking of the fire, and rocked some more.
“I didn’t plan these blazes, radio listeners,” he said in his announcer voice.
Sometime in the night, his mother came back, closing the screen door slowly so not to awaken him. Matt lay on the roof, watched the valley and the sky until full light returned, then climbed down the ladder and into his truck, rolled a marijuana cigarette and headed for town. As he drove through the new subdivision to check on the garage, a girl on a horse rode out from a side street. Matt slowed to watch. The girl held the reins loosely and the horse seemed to guide itself. She rode alone, bouncing up and down against Mt. Usakam’s backdrop beyond her. Her green top matched the leaves of the poplars she moved under. Matt followed a bit with the truck, then stopped.
“I don’t want to go there,” he said, as the girl and the horse turned towards the valley. “If a chick doesn’t want her hair touched, I have to respect that.”
He drove up past the burned garage, then to the view at the edge of town, that looked over the fields and farms. His eyes scanned the valley below, the new houses and the old farms. Everything always changed. It was an ambitious goal, to stay away from girls, to stop the urge to watch faces in the flames.
“That was my last glow,” he announced, and threw a roach end out the window.
He sat in his truck, staring across the valley.
“You folks will never know how hard it is,” he spoke towards the chimney tops and shimmering roofs along the hills, beyond the summer trees. “You will never see the world like I do. But I’m going to be different. I’m going to be a good boy. I’m going to look after my mom. I’m going to be a firefighter.” He put on his blue tinged sunglasses and whispered, “Nobody is going to drive us out.” Then he started up his truck, and used his deep announcer voice. “That’s all for this morning, radio listeners.”
Harrison Kim
At the party, Matt touched a girl’s hair. She sat beside him, both their backs against the wall. The chestnut-coloured hair shone silky, fell in a patchouli scent over her shoulders. He breathed deeply and stroked the tresses. He’d taken a hit of acid earlier and each stroke lasted a long time.
“What are you doing?” The girl jumped up, swayed to one side.
Matt pulled his lighter out. He lifted it above his head, flicked it a couple of times.
“How do you like my flame?” he said. “I can summon the past, present, and future!”
“Get out!” said the girl. “Who the hell invited you?”
“I’m not hurting anybody,” Matt said. “Check out these guns.”
He stuck out his arm and made a fist. His biceps popped out the edge of his T shirt.
“You’re not in reality, man!” someone yelled. “You’re on steroids.”
Matt pulled his shirt up past his navel and staggered out, sweeping a bottle off a table on his way. He liked the sound of glass crashing to the floor, and the screeches from the teenagers behind him.
“Those people don’t understand me,” he told Mom the next morning, as he shoved log after log into the trailer’s blazing wood stove.
“I think that’s enough fuel,” Mom said. “It’s summertime.” She flipped a few fried eggs. “I’m going to move out of here,” she told him. “There’s the mushroom farm next door stinking up the place, and of course Daddy’s gone.”
Matt stared into the flames.
“Sometimes I see faces in there,” he said. He stared closer. “I met a chick at that party.”
“I told you to stay away from parties,” Mom told him.
Her hands shook as she pushed some plates into the top shelf.
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” Matt told her. He peered into the spaces between the logs. “I sure would like to check out that chick’s face in this fire.”
“It’s too hot,” said Mom. “I’d ask you to open a window but there’s that mushroom stench.”
“Yeah,” said Matt. He lifted his head. “You’re always talking about it.”
“That farmer’s a wicked man,” said Mom.
Matt slammed the stove door shut, slid into his built-on annex at the side of the trailer, where he played at being a radio announcer.
“This is CKIX first station on the dial,” he declared. “The weather today looks hot and dry, so parents, make sure your kids don’t play with matches.”
He gazed at his big green eyes and full mouth in the side mirror. Girls liked his looks, but then he grinned with that mouth, and they jumped back. Matt paced up and down in the trailer, formally announcing each song he spun on his vintage record player.
“Be careful and sensitive when you listen to the past,” he said. “That’s another day, another show folks.”
He pulled out his extensive set of weights, heaved them from side to side, practiced curls, a hundred reps each. He lay on his back and lifted fifty.
“Be careful,” he repeated with each push. The room spun large around him.
He took twenty minutes to re-stack the weights, placing each one back in its proper place, wiping off the sweat with a towel. He folded the cloth, pushed his way out the door, strode towards his rusted pickup truck. He stopped, turned up the hill a moment, and peered down the six-foot-deep foxhole he’d been digging there for the past week.
“Nice excavation,” he said.
He caught a glimpse of Mom staring out at him, the red laundry basket in her hands.
He jumped in the car and started up the engine. There was always a fire in there he could push faster. He couldn’t look inside, but he knew there were faces dancing in the pistons, faces that appeared in all flame. He’d been a little kid when he first saw the images. They rose, appearing and disappearing on the current of an aroma rising from an open container in the old farm barn. They didn’t look like anyone, they changed too fast, but he caught glimpses.
“Is that you, Daddy?” he’d said, and walked towards the scent, stood over the jerry can, watched his tiny hands grab the spout. Then he breathed deeply of the sweetness.
When he turned around, the tractor was talking to him.
“Matt,” it said, “Daddy told you not to sniff gasoline.”
Matt knew what his dad told him. He always loved his dad. Daddy bounced him on his knee in front of the campfire and Matt’s favorite memory was feeling Daddy’s arms around him while he watched the glowing coals redden and blacken, hiss and spit. He recalled all the little animals and insects he saw in there, rising and falling with the smoke and ashes, as Daddy laughed and smoked his doobie cigarette, the red end glowing.
Daddy was dead of a stroke now, not three months ago.
“I’m scared,” he told Mom just after the funeral. “Daddy’s gone.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said, “Without your father here.”
“I’m going to be a fireman,” he told her, and he started lifting weights the next day, in preparation for the volunteer exam.
Now, after his weight session, he drove his pickup to The Tumbleweed Pub, jumped out and adjusted his belt. He checked his collar in the side mirror. He preferred button-down shirts and ironed pants, he ironed all Mom’s stuff too, since Daddy’s passing. It was great to see the cracks and flaws straighten under the heat. In the pub, a few fortyish guys in tight-fitting pants sat around drinking beer. One of them was Ogden Hume, the mushroom farmer from down the hill.
“Hey, Matt!” Hume said. “You’re looking mighty fine. Coming in from the heat?”
“Yeah, Hume,” Matt answered. “I need a cool one.”
He sat and the two of them drank.
“You’ve trained yourself well,” Hume noted. “You should be able to pass that volunteer firefighter test.”
“I can haul a firehose a hundred feet in less than twenty seconds,” Matt said.
“That’s impressive,” said Hume. “A blaze in town destroyed a garage this morning,” he continued. “A bunch of teens were partying in the house right beside it at the time.”
“Spark hazard’s pretty high these days,” said Matt.
Hume nodded, turned to look as some young guys burst through the door, all in different coloured shirts. Matt reached over, dropped a hit of acid into the distracted farmer’s beer.
“You’re gonna have a good time tonight,” he said, as Hume quaffed a large swallow. “You know what I want?” he asked.
“What do you want, son?”
“I want people to see the world like I do.”
“Your youth is merely a flicker,” said Hume. “Best to burn it up and not worry so much.”
“My Mom says she’s gonna move,” said Matt. “She doesn’t like the stench from your mushroom farm.”
“Well,” said Hume, “Cody and I bought the property off you guys, then you settled next door. You could’ve lived anywhere.”
“Enjoy your beer,” Matt said.
He stood up, grinned with his huge mouth spread, then leaped out the door and into his truck, fired it up and circled out over the new subdivision above the town. He looked through the distance at Hume’s farm on the side of Mount Usakam, the farm that was once his family’s place. He folded his fingers to his palms like tiny telescopes and held them to his eyes to view the barn where he’d first sniffed the gasoline, where Daddy held him on his knee all those years ago.
“I sure would like to touch that chestnut haired girl again,” he said out loud.
He drove past the newer homes, by the still-smouldering garage. The brand-new town fire truck sat there with the hose on top trained at the ashes. Matt parked his vehicle and walked over.
“Does it look like arson?” he asked the fireman, who stood watching the water, wiping the back of his neck with a wet towel.
“With these situations, its usually compressed oily rags that catch alight,” the fireman said. “I guess there’ll be an investigation.”
“Yeah, those things can burn,” Matt nodded. “Lucky the house didn’t go too.”
He wondered if the girl was home. Funny thing was, now he couldn’t remember her face, just her hair, the tumbling tresses like the leaves protecting the trees bending in the wind all up Mount Usakam.
“We sure so need some rain,” said the fireman.
“Yeah,” Matt said, and paced back to his truck.
He almost reached it when a girl came walking the other way. She wore a floppy hat, and a white tank top that began above her navel and went up.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about last night. I was a little drunk.”
“Do I know you?” she said, raising her hat.
“Oh,” he said. “The one I’m looking for has chestnut hair.”
He jumped in the truck, opened all the windows and turned on the radio.
“That DJ’s got no depth,” he noted. “I could replace him in a second.”
He turned the volume down, dropped his last hit of acid and began practicing with his resonant voice. “Hey, everyone, it’s Matt Cloutier from CKIX, bringing you all the hits from the hills.”
When he got back to the trailer the sun was going down and the air stank like dead fish. He heard Mom on the phone to brother Jerry the real estate agent. She said “So you think I can get eighty thousand? But what about Matt?”
He breathed in another deep gout of the mushroom stench, then walked up the hill carrying a small canister, hearing the dry branches crackle underfoot. Dust rose at every step. When he arrived at the foxhole, he gathered branches and small logs and threw them in. He poured down the contents of the canister, then threw a piece of birchbark.
“Whoosh,” he said, as the fire caught, and the flames exploded.
He lay down at the edge of the hole to watch, shielding his face from the smoke.
“This is the safest way to burn in extreme conditions,” he told himself.
He peered at the flames, imaged Ogden Hume’s face flickering away, then his mom’s visage, her clear blue eyes like sea glass.
“Yeah, anything compressed can catch,” he thought, thinking of the fireman and his oily rags combustion theory.
A pressure started in his own mind.
“That fucking mushroom farm,” he said, as the smoke rose.
He covered the hole with branches and jogged back towards the trailer in the semi-darkness. A police car idled outside.
“Do I smell burning?” the tiny female officer yelled from the car window.
“Could be. There’s a lot of odd stuff going on around here,” said Matt.
“We’re looking for your neighbor, Ogden Hume.”
The officer pressed some buttons on her on-board computer.
Mom stood on the porch, hands on her hips.
“What bylaw has he broken now?”
“His partner reported he went screaming up the mountain.”
“Haven’t seen him,” Matt said, but then again maybe he had caught a glimpse, in the flames.
The officer wasn’t bad looking.
“I’ll sweep through the fields,” he grinned.
He crossed the gravel road, rolled under a barbed wire fence then stood tall on the other side, peeled off his T shirt and swung his shoulders for effect, then jogged towards the mushroom farm. He’d hiked through these fields all through boyhood, his mind full of gasoline fantasies. The trees bowed down to him, and the thistles and wild rose bushes flattened ahead of his steps, to allow him safe passage. He let his fingers dangle and touch the tips of the tall grass. It was like walking through a field of girl hair.
“Simple nature understands,” Matt told himself. “She knows who I am.”
As he ran, he felt every step imprint in the dirt, he inhaled the dry dusk breeze and caught once more the fishy scent of the farm. He leaped down a slope and into Ogden’s driveway, bolted up the road to the old barn. Ogden had built quite a few new buildings for his mushrooms, but the barn stood as it always had, with its wooden silo leaning.
“He left this one out,” Matt thought, and strode in.
The old tractor still loomed in one corner, how could that be? He stared harder, thought he saw a glimpse, as if behind a curtain. A small child stood with its arms raised, mouth in a huge grin. As Matt stared, the child’s arms moved up and down, like a bat, or a bird’s. Then the image disappeared. Matt ran forward, pulled out his lighter and flicked it at the old straw where the child was.
“What goes around comes around,” he said, as the flames caught, and his own shadow vanished behind the sparking. He turned and bolted out, without looking back. He seemed invisible, sheltered by this alteration in time.
“No one’s going to drive Mom out,” he said, scuttling up the other side of the hill towards Mount Usakam.
He didn’t stop running for a while. As he circled around to the darkened trailer, he heard sirens. When he looked down big black smoke rose from the mushroom farm, into the maw of the night. Within that smoke, flames shot up. Matt imagined his own face rising. He pictured his profile as a child, then as a teenager and adult, he thought of his reflection in a mirror, then checked the fire again.
“That place is part of me too,” he said, inhaling the smoky air as he ran along the old deer trails to the trailer.
Down below, he noticed firefighters with flashlights on their heads scurrying about, and water arcing into the night.
“Hope they have protective gear,” Matt told Mom. “I’m gonna wet the trailer roof down.”
He turned on the outside tap, pulled the garden hose to the ladder and climbed, stood on the trailer top, where he had a commanding view of the sunset valley. He sprayed for a long time. He liked the way the water flow cascaded off the sides.
He heard a pounding on the hill above, someone running, breaking branches. A clear cry rang out, followed by several muffled ones. Matt scrambled off the roof. He filled two watering cans and zig-zagged up the hill towards the foxhole. He looked up to see the first stars overhead.
He heard “Help!”
Someone was in the excavation all right, lucky there didn’t seem to be much smoke rising. He lowered himself to the edge, lay prone, and peered over.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I fell in this fucking firehole!”
Ogden Hume leaned against one side, holding his knees.
“Stand up and I’ll help you out,” Matt said.
It wouldn’t be easy to lift the farmer, but Matt imagined pulling weights, squatted down and squeezed hard under the man’s arms. He stared straight into Ogden’s grime streaked and cut up face as the farmer’s biceps heaved.
“What a memorable moment,” Matt grinned. “A glimpse of closeness.”
“Just get me out of here,” Ogden yelled, and wriggled from his grasp.
Matt breathed in the air around the farmer, “got that aroma captured,” he thought, as Ogden struggled out of the hole.
Matt emptied one watering can round the edges of the opening and poured the contents of the other straight down into it.
“Safety first,” Matt said. He looked at Ogden. “You’re all scratched.”
“Something happened to me after I left that pub today. I wasn’t even that drunk. Then I fell in this burning bear trap.”
“Yeah, well, I think you might have done some things you regret,” Matt said. “Then again, most of us have.”
“What’s that smell?” said Ogden.
“It’s your farm burning,” Matt told him. “Just like that trap.”
“Holy shit.”
The farmer stumbled down the hill, Matt zigzagging behind him with the empty cans.
“I was watering my roof,” Matt called. “And saw the smoke from the farm. It looked like your head, actually, rising from the trees.”
Pat Wuori, the neighbor, pulled into the yard as they reached the trailer.
“We’re checking for any igniting sparks,” she said.
“I’ve got Ogden Hume here,” Matt announced. “Can you take him back to his place, I mean, what’s left of it?”
“Wow, you found Mr. Hume!” Pat pushed her black hair out of her eyes and Matt thought it was too bad she was married. “His friend Cody’s worried sick,” she said.
Hume let out a groan as he gazed into the valley. A siren sounded, then stopped, then started again. Mom stood in flip flops and Daddy’s red T-shirt that came down past her knees. She held the still-flowing hose.
“I’ll take over the watering,” Matt told her. “It’s firefighter practice.”
He thought about going with Pat to check on the course of the farm blaze, but figured the urge was only his response to the look of her hair. Anyway, there was just enough room in her truck for Ogden.
He paced up and down with the hose, soaking the underbrush between the trailer and the road, speaking out loud in his radio announcer voice.
“Good evening, listeners of CKIX radio, there’s been a big blaze tonight down at the mushroom farm. The farmer’s been found hiding in a flaming foxhole and they say he’ll be under arrest by morning. Looks like a clear case of brain fever leading to arson. Have a good evening, folks and don’t forget to thank your local firefighters.”
He stared through a gap in the trees at Mount Usakam. As he looked, his mother’s frail form appeared at the bottom of the driveway.
“I’m going to sell,” his mother called. Her voice shook. “I can’t take care of us anymore.’
She started walking down the road towards the mushroom farm.
“I can see spirits in the fire,” Matt yelled after her. “But I can’t bring Daddy back.”
He squatted atop the trailer, watching the glowing barn. The town’s yellow fire truck spurted an arc of water. The spraying sound calmed him. He lay on his back, looked straight up and viewed smoke rising towards the stars.
“How far does the past go up before it has to come down?” he wondered.
He rocked a little from side to side as the stars sparked above, then lay on his stomach, thinking of the fire, and rocked some more.
“I didn’t plan these blazes, radio listeners,” he said in his announcer voice.
Sometime in the night, his mother came back, closing the screen door slowly so not to awaken him. Matt lay on the roof, watched the valley and the sky until full light returned, then climbed down the ladder and into his truck, rolled a marijuana cigarette and headed for town. As he drove through the new subdivision to check on the garage, a girl on a horse rode out from a side street. Matt slowed to watch. The girl held the reins loosely and the horse seemed to guide itself. She rode alone, bouncing up and down against Mt. Usakam’s backdrop beyond her. Her green top matched the leaves of the poplars she moved under. Matt followed a bit with the truck, then stopped.
“I don’t want to go there,” he said, as the girl and the horse turned towards the valley. “If a chick doesn’t want her hair touched, I have to respect that.”
He drove up past the burned garage, then to the view at the edge of town, that looked over the fields and farms. His eyes scanned the valley below, the new houses and the old farms. Everything always changed. It was an ambitious goal, to stay away from girls, to stop the urge to watch faces in the flames.
“That was my last glow,” he announced, and threw a roach end out the window.
He sat in his truck, staring across the valley.
“You folks will never know how hard it is,” he spoke towards the chimney tops and shimmering roofs along the hills, beyond the summer trees. “You will never see the world like I do. But I’m going to be different. I’m going to be a good boy. I’m going to look after my mom. I’m going to be a firefighter.” He put on his blue tinged sunglasses and whispered, “Nobody is going to drive us out.” Then he started up his truck, and used his deep announcer voice. “That’s all for this morning, radio listeners.”
