Kiefer

　

　

　

1.

Around noon, the wind changed direction. Gaby went from the bank into the parking lot and looked up at the mountain. The hot air smelled like a kiln baking pottery. The mountain’s top was swathed in smoke. Gaby had never seen a volcano erupting. Would it look like this? The wind dragged snake-shaped plumes of white smoke across the forested terrace from which the summit’s cliffs and pinnacles rose.

Gaby took out her cell-phone and called her husband, Ben. He taught art classes at the junior college on the edge of town. She knew his schedule and that his teaching duties were ordinarily finished by noon.

"I’m worried about Kiefer," Gaby told Ben. "Will you check on him? If we have to evacuate, make sure you leave the toilet lids up so that he can drink."

Ben said that he would drive up to the village where they lived under the mountain. It was so hot that the cell-phone came away wet from where Gaby pressed it to her ear. She was afraid that her sweat would dampen the touch-screen and make it impossible to use and, so, she used a Kleenex to carefully dab dry the phone.

A TV was tuned to local news in the bank’s break room. One of the loan officers came out to the teller’s station where Gaby was working. She whispered the news about the mountain to Gaby. Then, the manager came and told Gaby she could leave for the rest of the day.

The road was empty in the foothills, two-lane asphalt wriggling between stony, dry ravines and, then, uphill in switchbacks blasted out of the rock. The quartz and granite exposed at the cuts radiated heat into the windy sky. On some of the curves, the hillside fell away and Gaby could see down into the valley where the river ran in a corridor of green shade from the sparse, white suburbs through downtown’s blue glass towers. The long pale buildings of the community college were like empty barges run aground on the reef of a low-ridge guarded by huge wind-turbines at each side of the hill-top. High winds had stilled the wind turbines and their rotors were motionless, rearing up huge white crosses in the blue hot air and vibrating like tuning forks. Someone had once told Gaby that if the turbines weren’t braked and were allowed to spin during this kind of wind, the towers would tear loose and walk like giants across the land.

Some pick-up trucks full of sooty men came in convoy down the mountainside in the oncoming lane. The men had rubbed around their eyes so that there were white sweaty holes in the ash masks covering their faces. Overhead a couple of big-bellied planes buzzed listlessly like great, fat yellow-jackets. Two helicopters hung like kites to the west, rocking a little in the gale.

Above the switchbacks, the road aimed uphill, running arrow straight up a wooded slope like a gently ascending ramp. The land around the ramp had been logged a couple decades before and house-high trees flanked the highway. Gravel lanes led to the side toward summer houses built beside cup-shaped holes in the granite, stone tanks sometimes half-full of water but now mostly drought-empty. Some cars and trucks were ahead of Gaby on the two-lane State highway and they gradually came to a stop. A fire truck and two ambulances that had climbed into the hills behind her, pulled into the oncoming lane and cautiously at first, then, with more speed passed the column of vehicles stopped on the slope. Gaby sat in her car with the brakes engaged listening to the radio. Then, she put the car in park. A semi-tractor hauling a flat-bed on which there were some front-end loaders and bulldozer pulled out behind her into the oncoming traffic and passed by where she was stopped. Then, after a couple minutes, several ambulances and police cars with their lights spinning screamed by, heading downhill. For a few minutes, the oncoming lane was empty, mirages of hot air trembling over the black top.

Gaby didn’t want her car to overheat and so shut off her engine, stepped out of the vehicle, and tried to call Ben. The phone call went right to voice-mail.

A worried-looking man with dark wrap-around sunglasses exited the car ahead of her. He gestured to Gaby. "Do you have reception?" he called. "Yes, but it just keeps going to voice-mail," she said.

The man walked forward on the center-line next to the cars queued-up on the highway. The air was very hot and gusts of wind kicked up dust from road shoulders, blowing garbage so that paper sacks and plastic and cans skittered along the ditch. The man talked to a few people and, then, came back to where Gaby was parked. By this time, a dozen cars were drawn up behind her.

Gaby called Ben again. The call went to voice-mail again. The worried-looking man said that the police had erected a road block a half-mile ahead on the road and no one was allowed to travel any higher on the mountain. "But I live up there," Gaby said. She said the name of the village.

"I know," the worried-looking man said. "But they say it’s too dangerous."

Gaby nodded. The man fiddled a little with his cell-phone, then, he walked stiffly down the road shoulder to the where the green shadows of the trees whipping in the wind agitated the surface of the ground and made it look a little like a turbulent sea. He stepped into the shadows and, then, walked a short distance into the woods.

Gaby wondered if he was looking for a place with better reception. She followed him into the flickering green shadows. It was a little cooler in the shelter of the trees protected from the oven wind. The man pressed forward through some dry-looking brush and, then, stopped. Gaby saw that he was urinating.

She turned away and began to back toward the road. The man finished and, then, turned around, zipping up his pants. He saw Gaby and winced.

Gaby looked up at the sky where some faint streaks of cloud were indistinguishable from the serpentine plumes of smoke. Everything above the trees was windblown and hurrying across the blue. It was just like a man to think he could piss out the fire.

"I’m sorry," the man said.

"No, it’s... it’s awful," she replied.

The man looked confused. Overhead, a water-plane hummed.

"Yes, it’s awful," the man said.

They went back to the cars lined up on the road. Several camouflage-colored army trucks with huge balloon-shaped tires came slowly down the oncoming lane. Gaby’s call to Ben went to voice-mail.

After a couple minutes, some of the cars ahead peeled off to the left, made u-turns and drove downhill. Gaby tried the phone again and, then, got into her car, turned on the engine, and, then, cautiously edged out into the oncoming lane. Nothing was coming. She made three-point turn and, then, drove back down the mountain.

The streets of the city were deserted. It was too hot for anyone to be abroad. The insects were silent and the dogs were lying on their sides with their tongues extended, panting desperately.

Gaby went to the bank and sat in the break-room. The TV showed images of ruins and fire. She called Ben but the phone again went to voice-mail.

When the bank closed, Gaby went to a motel but all rooms were rented. The motel clerk told her to go to the High School. At the High School, the gymnasium was air-conditioned and the hardwood floor covered with tarps to protect the finish against the rows of little silver cots set up there. Gaby had given up smoking years ago. But she was nervous and so she drove to the Kwik-Trip and bought some cigarettes. She was lighting up when her phone rang. It was Ben.

Ben said that he made it to their street in the village on the mountain.

"Did you check for Kiefer?"

"No," Ben said.

"Why not?"

"I couldn’t," Ben said. "There were soldiers guarding everything and they had blocked the roads with armored personnel carriers."

"Could you get to the house to make sure the toilet lids were all open?"

"You don’t understand," Ben said.

"What don’t I understand?"

"There is no house, no street even, nothing at all," Ben said.

"What about the cat?"

"Nothing," Ben said. "No sign."



2.

One time only, Gaby went with Ben to where the house had been. The sky was grey and the earth was covered in cinders and the blackened trees stood in eerie, creaking ranks around the sidewalks leading to nowhere and the spalled fingers of chimneys pointing upward over pits full of burnt rubbish and black alligator-scaled timber. Everything was grey or black except the earth showing brown between the windrows of soot.

Ben didn’t want her to see the charred skeleton of a dog still chained to burnt wreckage of a dog house, but Gaby noticed anyhow and she began to cry. Her tears softened the town to the dark pillars of the charred trees and the grey, featureless heaps of rubble. They drove on Main Street. Refrigerators like sarcophagi stood in rows in the collapsed ruins of the appliance shop. The eye of a huge flat TV was lying face down in the muck.

Where the town’s grocery store had been, a man stood at the crossroads tacking a sign to a charred tree. The man’s face was slippery with zinc-white splotches of silvadene and one of his hands was buried in a thick white mitten of bandage.

The sign said: TOO TUFF TOO DIE – WE WILL REBUILD.

Gaby said that it was torture to see the ruins of the town. She told Ben that she never wanted to come back.



3.

A hermit lived in a cabin four miles from the village on the other side of the mountain. The village was just a crossroads in the tall pines with a gas station and motel, a tavern, a couple of trailer houses tethered to trees in the meadow, and a bait shop. Twice a month when VA checks were issued and social security paid, the hermit pedaled his bike over the rutted and winding logging roads to the tavern. He sat in the bar by himself drinking Coors light on tap. Some of the regulars tried to talk to him, but the hermit didn’t have much to say. The owner of the bar said that the hermit had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and that the terrible things that he had seen in combat had made him aloof and reticent.

The hermit would drink all day, one tap beer after another, but he didn’t seem to get drunk. However, after night fall, the old man would go outside and try to straddle his bicycle but always fail in that effort. Then, he would fall down and the bar owner would have to enlist a couple men to carry the snoring man upstairs to the empty rooms above the tavern. An old futon was on the landing at the top of the stairs and the bar-owner would leave the hermit on that mattress to sleep it off.

At first, it was hard to carry the hermit up the stairs because he was a solid man, all gristle from chopping wood and hauling water at his cabin. For many years, the hermit ate a hamburger for lunch at the tavern and, then, perhaps, had a grilled cheese sandwich in the evening. But he ate less and less as the years advanced and, so, he became easier and easier to haul upstairs to the dusty futon. Before he vanished in the fire, the bartender could pretty readily carry the old bag-of-bones upstairs to the futon by himself. In the morning, the hermit would start drinking again and, sometimes, he had in his battered pea-coat, rabbit furs, soft as down, that he traded to the barkeep for booze. After a couple days, his money and furs for trading were exhausted and, then, he would take a bottle of vodka on credit from the bar, mount his bike, and ride unsteadily past the bait shop and the motel to the crooked logging trail that led to his cabin. The bar owner knew the hermit would be back next VA and Social Security pay period and that he would open his tab by first paying for the bottle that he had taken two weeks earlier.

No one saw the hermit after the big fire. A few months passed. The weather remained unseasonably warm and dry. In late October, cracks developed in the season and cold began to seep through them. Snow lodged among the fissures and gorges above the tree-line. Burnt places in the forest became swampy and the cold rain dislodged charred hills that sloughed off the mountain like rotting skin.

The crossroads village was misty and the needles of the tall trees dripped down ice-water. The day before social security and VA checks were issued, the bar-owner drove down the mountain to the city. Business had been slow since the fire and he was cash-poor. Some of his regular patrons were accustomed to cashing their benefit checks in his tavern and he needed to have folding money on hand. 　

The teller was a nice-looking woman, probably in her mid-fifties. The bar-owner had seen this teller before but didn’t know her name. She manned the drive-through window dedicated to commercial accounts. The city in the valley was always warmer and dryer than the mountainside. The trees were golden on the banks of the river braided through town but still dressed in their leaves. At higher elevations, the leaves on the deciduous trees were fallen and gathered up around the ankles of the tree-trunks. The season was harder to read from vegetation at the crossroads where his bar was located because all of the trees there were spiky, conical evergreens.

"Did you have any damage?" the teller asked him.

"No,"the bar-owner said. "But business is off."

"We lost everything," the teller said. She told him that she was living with her husband in a motel on the edge of town. The bar-owner knew the place, an old two-story block with sagging exterior walkways, a faded kidney-shaped pool with diving board removed at the demand of the insurer, and a diminutive totem-pole posted outside the office. Before he joined AA, the bar-owner sometimes met women at that place. He shuddered at the memory.

"That won’t work in the long-run," the tavern owner said.

Sleet complicated the next day. Nonetheless, the bar’s regular customers on government benefits were in attendance, although making their appearance an hour or so later. A old gent with an orange-yellow beard told the bar-keep that there was cat skulking around the front door. The cat was bristling against the cold and limping a little on wounded paws.

"It ain’t fit out there for man nor beast," the tavern-owner said. He went to the door, held it open, and looked for the cat. Sleet streaked down but there weren’t any animals in sight. Then, one of the other regulars said that the cat had come into the tavern already and was hiding under the billiards table. Someone took a broom and prodded the cat until it emerged.

The cat was an old tom with white scars on his nose. His fur was matted. There was a raw bald spot on the back of his head and his right front and left hindquarter paws were also scabby with healing burns. The cat brushed up against the old men and made a piteous cry like a human soul. Someone bought a tough strip of beef jerky from the glass jug behind the bar and fed it to the animal. The cat cried-out again.

"The old fellow wants a beer," one of the customers said.

As an experiment, an old soldier put out three shallow bowls on the floor beneath the barstool that the hermit had occupied during his visits to the tavern. The bowls were for popcorn that the bar once offered to its patrons – the popper machine had been broken for a few years and was foul-smelling with remnants of ancient butter. The soldier had put a couple dollars on the counter and the bartender pulled a splash of Budweiser into one of the bowls. He splashed Coors light and Olympia into the other bowls and, then, stooped to line them up on the floor.

"Cat won’t drink beer," another customer said, grimacing a little at the outlandish thought.

The battered old tom-cat inched toward the three bowls. He twitched his wounded nose, sniffing at the beer. Then, the cat looked up quizzically at the bartender and old soldier and began to lap up Coors light in the center bowl. When the cat had finished, the soldier picked up the three bowls and set them on the bar. The bar-keep filled up the old popcorn bowl that had contained Coors light with more of the same beer. When the bowl brimming with beer was put on the floor again, the cat began to purr and, then, lapped up the Coors light with his pink tongue.

"He’s thirsty," the old soldier said.

"We’ll have to keep the bowl filled," the bartender said.

When the cat had finished drinking from the bowl, the old soldier stooped to pick up the animal. The tom-cat wriggled out of his arms and limped toward pool table. He turned and sat on his haunches warily regarding the soldier and the bartender and the other men perched on stools along the polished wooden counter.

"He don’t like to be cuddled," the bartender said.

"It figures," the old soldier replied.

One of the other men said: "Ain’t it the damndest thing?"

The sleet slapped against the door and window. Everyone agreed it was a good day to be inside.

　

4.

Ben finagled a transfer to Contra Costa Community college. Gaby retired. Her friends at work hosted a small party for her in the Bank’s community room. There were fudge bars, chocolate chip cookies, and a fruit plate with strawberries and kiwi. The head teller had brought a couple of bottles of wine and opened them to toast Gaby. She tried to say a few words in farewell but couldn’t finish because she was crying.

There were delays in processing the insurance claim. Ben and Gaby moved to Vallejo and rented an apartment. They were able to live in a small place because everything they owned had been destroyed in the fire.

Gaby’s daughter was pregnant. The young woman and her husband lived in Walnut Creek. Ben said that the fire was a blessing in disguise because it had forced them to move to a place only 15 miles from where Gaby’s daughter lived.

On the first weekend after the child was born, Gaby went to her daughter’s home to help her with the new child. She planned to stay overnight. Without thinking much about it, Gaby went into the bathroom and made sure that the toilet lid was lifted so that the cat could drink if he became thirsty. Then, she remembered that Kiefer was lost in the fire. Ben was attending a conference in Sacramento and so she was alone. For a half hour, she felt overwhelmed and sat in the kitchen staring out the window. White houses and pale apartment buildings hovered on hillsides overlooking a swath of greyish water. A freeway followed the curve of a bare ridge golden with sun-bleached dry grass. The traffic on the freeway was bumper-to-bumper, moving ahead in spurts.

The baby was named Sam. He had a perfectly formed bald head, dark eyes, and the jovial toothless mouth of an old man. When she held the baby, Gaby noticed that there was little burgundy-colored blemish on the back of the infant’s head. Three of the baby’s fingers also were purplish.

"This is called a stork-bite," Gaby’s daughter said.

"It’s an angel kiss," Gaby replied. "That’s what I’ve heard it called."



5.

The owner of the bait shop was angry. His receipts for the season were next to nothing. He sat in the tavern at the mountain crossroads railing against the insurance companies and FEMA. All the wealthy folks with their "Sierra chateaus" as he called them were making a fortune from insurance claims. But no one was rebuilding – the barren hillsides were prone to landslides and who was to say that another fire might not again devastate the area. The town on the other side of the mountain was mostly abandoned and the trails and logging roads up to the high country lakes were dangerous. Charred trees had fallen every which way, blocking some of the ways, and, when the winds blew, the groves of burnt forest were deadly with falling timber. Some of the lakes were choked with ash and the fish all killed and it was almost impossible to reach the untouched streams and lakes in alpine meadows.

"Everyone’s getting rich off this fire but me," the bait shop man said.

One of the men in the bar had lost his summer cabin in the blaze. He said that he resented some of the comments made by the bait shop man. The bartender tried to soothe hurt feelings by buying everyone in the tavern a round of drinks. But the bait shop owner was very drunk and this didn’t assuage his resentment. The man who had lost his summer cabin said something that the bait shop owner found offensive and, so, he stood up and shouted curses in a rage and, then, kicked an old tom-cat that was lurking under the stools next to a bowl of beer.

The cat yowled and one of the other patrons knocked down the bait shop guy. He stood up and demanded satisfaction and so the two men went outside into the parking lot. The bait shop owner tried to punch the other man but missed. He fell down on the asphalt. When he tried to get up, the other man clubbed him over the nose with both fists. The bait shop man fell backward again and his opponent, then, kicked him hard in the head.

The bait shop owner sprawled on the tar for a while and, then, sat up.

"You didn’t need to kick me in the head," he said ruefully.

The other man apologized and said that he was sorry. He bent down to give the fallen bait shop owner a hand in rising. The bait shop owner was burly and had trouble regaining his feet and, in the process of helping him up, the other man hurt his back.

They went back into the bar and bought each other drinks. The bartender offered another round of drinks on the house. Vindicated, the old tom cat sat between the billiard tables grinning at the two men.

　

6.

Ben closed on the transaction at the Bank where Gaby had once worked. A lawyer was present and a young woman representing his insurer. The table in the conference room was covered with papers that had to be signed. Everyone was cordial and shook hands when the deal was done.

The day was warm and the chrome on the cars blazed brightly in the parking lots. Ben looked at the at his cell-phone and saw that he was ahead of schedule. The closing at the Bank had taken less time than he anticipated and, so, he decided to drive up the mountain for one last look at the property.

The switchbacks above the valley were steeper than he recalled. Ben remembered all the times that he had driven on this road in all sorts of weather – he recalled mist and fog and rain; he recalled sleet and snow and, even, the haze from the fire hanging heavily in the air, seeming to clog the ports in his engine so that the pick-up truck stuttered and strained. Then, the two-lane highway straightened out for the long uphill climb and he could see down into the valley where the town glittered and greenish-brown irrigation canals crisscrossed the cultivated land and the community college stood on the ridge surrounded by parking lots and flanked by wind turbines turning lazily in the Spring breeze. The view was beautiful and Ben regretted the hundreds of times that he come this way without pausing to look into the valley.

The road hooked tightly and, then, zigzagged between scorched forests up to the townsite. Walls of fire had hemmed in this blacktop and Ben sensed his forehead bead with sweat. He felt jittery and, for a moment, had trouble catching his breath.

Most of the intersections in the townsite were blocked with yellow and orange saw-horses drooping down greasy-looking orange rags. Someone had removed the skeleton of the burned dog as well as the charred dog-house. Washers and dryers and refrigerators no longer marked the ruins of the appliance store, although Ben saw a couple window-air-conditioners still toppled into the ditch near where the store had been.

He parked his car at the lane next to the ashes of the grocery store. Words had been scrawled on a plywood panel spiked to a burnt tree. The weather had shredded the wood and the writing on it was no longer legible.

Ben walked a few hundred yards to where his home had been. The blaze had burned so hot that the loam underfoot was hard, baked to the consistency of a fired pot. Some curlicues of green leaf wound around the trunks of the trees still standing upright in the cinders. Ash sifted over an abandoned sidewalk and the ghost forest, all blackened columns vibrating in the wind, made an eerie creaking sound.

Ben thought he heard the sound of a baby crying. Something moved in the black tatters of the underbrush. No one was around. At the end of the street, where seared bricks were heaped in a pile. Ben saw an animal the size of a cat darting through the shadows.