Boding Embers
by Alden Nagel
Spokane is your first taste of Washington or your last. A younger brother to the western cities—one without its shit quite figured out. But it’s also a city that learns quicker. Seattle didn’t take its first fire well. The Great Fire. Spokane’s great fire is every August, give or take. Though some of that’s gotta be geography. When Seattle burns, where are you supposed to go? The fire might kill you; the water will. Spokane burns and you’re spoiled for choice. Twenty minutes that way and you’re safe. Thirty minutes south and you’re rooting for a different college team. Or you stay put—the fire’s business is with the hills. The city? He’s just a boy.
It’s not just the fire that leaves Spokane alone. I thought I’d end up two-hundred miles north. Save me the trouble of talking to a Mountie. Spokane through Idaho’s chimney and across the unshaven curve of Montana is what we’ll call the Neapolitan of Nothing. Three states, two state lines, and there won’t be a damn thing worth a photo. Small towns in the pathetic way, not the cute way. Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, a lake or two, reservations. Residents take day trips out here; a travel agent couldn’t point out Haugen, Montana. Only reason I can is because, apparently, they got a hotel called 50,000 Silvers. Exactly that. 50,000 silver dollars, pinned to the walls in collector’s plaques. Stage where we lay the most sexless heist film of all time. I have this fantasy of picking a few off the wall. Five to thirty. Sell them for some pocket money—the lack thereof is starting to become a problem. I don’t know. Saw it on a brochure.
Small towns are easy. My passing through is the most interesting thing that happened all day, so long as a coyote doesn’t wander into town and fight one of the dogs. And there are so many. More than you’d think. Skykomish shouldn’t be as vivid to me as it is, not any more so than Almira, or Crater Hill, or Sprague. One of those isn’t real. Skykomish has the better real estate, if only slightly. Close to Leavenworth, already in the mountains, right on the rail line. A genuine coat of arms, too, not just a road sign. Howie tells me the town’s probably gone.
Oh, is this your snowbank? Spokane’s like Seattle in the few remaining pepper grounds, the mining town laws proven irrelevant by modern standards. But they still fly. A crafty public defender could load these old bullets. Namely squatter’s rights. Foreclosed house in one of the ungated communities, weeds sprouting in the basement, racoon turds in the fireplace. Unbecoming of even the average new homeowner, but perfect for dry sleeping and private crack smoking. Howie was nicer than I thought he’d be. I was laboring under the notion that crack was a stimulant, which it is, but not to Howie. He was perturbed, in few words, when I got the sublevel door open. Gave me a startled Woah, I told him I just needed somewhere less smoky—at ease, Private. That’s all we said, at first. He’s still in the basement, and I’m against the wall in what’d make a good kids room.
From the window I can glint the valley. The fire combs through the pattern baldness of woods, green and tan like a great mound of all the plastic army men on earth. The inferno gradient might be beautiful when I remember it later. Now it’s a teaser for what the end of the world may look like. At the crust, there’s the sparkling ring of yellow and white, the most intense color wrapped tight like wire, running down the hill like a bark stripper, which it functionally is. In its wake are the glowing rashes, spots of red highlighted in the still-burning trees. Not the leafy peacocks splayed and natural, but railroad spikes of wood standing from the charred floor. And above all that—smoke. The moon is bloody and dripping, the stars are gone.
And the people of Spokane go about their day. Howie isn’t bothered. For a moment, maybe just to stretch his legs, Howie came upstairs and asked where I was coming in from. I said Skykomish, which isn’t a total lie, and he actually knew where I was talking about. He had laughed—well, he coughed in a sort of amused way—and said I got out just in time. Skykomish has gotta be gone. Gassed out entirely. One road in and out, surrounded by burny stuff. I hadn’t thought about it. Not in those words. They do have a fire department. As in, they have volunteers and maybe some equipment. In the same way high schools have a defibrillator.
That’s why they have a church. When the annual fire pulls through, what’s the plan? Spokane is lucky, in this way. Far enough from the blast zone that the worst of things is smoke and temperatures. Spokanians eat inclement weather for lunch. It’s the only choice they have. For people like me, the only option is to keep moving. To places where The Great Fire doesn’t narrow things down. And they wonder why America doesn’t have anything old. It does, the problem is keeping any. Go up here and there’s fire. Go south and it’s Tornado Alley. Further south and you’re in hurricane country. Westward to California? They’ll tear down century old movie sets to make room for theme park attractions. History is borrowed, the only permanent thing here is memory. Maybe I should’ve remembered someone from Skykomish.
To me, at the time, they were actors in a play. Northwest Dogtooth. Of course there’s the one guy who works the gas station, of course there’s the one pastor, of course the fire department is resident volunteers, of course every building is the avatar of one soul. It’s the Wild West. Some boring nights I thought it may be nice to keep a journal. What would I say about Skykomish that I wouldn’t say about Crater Hill, which by the way was the fake one.
Let’s be fair and suggest this isn’t a failure of the town. People live in one place for years, decades, forever, because it’s home. Security has something to do with it—most people my age will never own a house, damn the town size. But why leave? What’s so awesome somewhere else? People around here leave for nothing, not volcanoes or fires. God himself could not sink this ship. That’s gotta be what love is. To feel like you belong somewhere and will die there if that’s what’s gotta happen. Howie must feel like he belongs here. The way he’ll drop his bag anywhere—the hall, against the front door. He’s a Sophomore eager to not do homework. I’m not well versed on squatter’s rights, but he must have a better claim to this house than I do. Fair. I don’t want it anyway.
I struggle to think where I’ve been that hasn’t yet bloated on smoke. My car’s gotta be toast. Hopefully no one was around when it exploded for the second time. Skykomish is a back porch smoker, peppered and soon ready to eat. Ditto to Index. In conditions like these they must do something about the rail lines, hot to the touch and cursed. I’m the only proof any of this ever happened. I leave footprints in the sand and the fire washes them away. The Greek elements are at play, ensuring no trace of humanity sticks around for too long. That may be what keeps me moving. Don’t stay too long; this world isn’t yours and it never will be. Might as well see all of it. Might as well window shop the world over.
What’s past is prologue. It didn’t happen—or it was happening and then stopped. The lesson is like the cow skull, horns and all, left picturesque in the desert while the rest of the cow buries in the sand.
My bag is gone.
This kid’s bedroom is darker than it was when I fell asleep; I thought my eyes needed to adjust. But the smoke traps the city in something like a cave. My eyes don’t adjust, not to that suggestion of night vision that may get us from the bed to the bathroom. I know my bag is gone. That’s where my eyes go, first thing I know I’m awake. Before the bag, it was my phone. I even crawl to the doorway, right to that nook of a coat rack where I had kept it tucked. Gonezo. The hat fell off and escaped abduction. Good for it. That sun faded Yankees fitted cap I found on the train tracks yesterday morning. Doesn’t fit my head but never know when I’ll need a hat. Alone, sans my bag, I hate the hat. Hate the hat more than I hate Howie, who probably took my bag. Less than useless; the one thing in or on my bag I could do with getting stolen. I take the hat from the floor and sling it at the window, where it lands back-first and doesn’t give me the fury of a plastic brim slapping glass I was hoping for. Pathetic as it is, I try again, this time aiming for the bedroom door. Again, the hat lands like it doesn’t want to wake anyone up. I’m denied even my meltdown. Which I guess means I need to skip to stage two.
Howie isn’t in the basement anymore. All he leaves behind is a burnt square of tinfoil. A calling card. I’ve never smoked crack—assuming that’s the one with the tinfoil. Pretty sure it is. The final frontier of artisan drugs. You know, the ones with a recipe. All that’s left after crack are the cleaning fluids under the sink, and the barrel-aged pharmaceuticals they don’t manufacture anymore. It’s not because of the crack that Howie stole my bag, let’s spare him some dignity. Let’s face it: there’s nothing I claim I’m doing that’s better than what Howie’s doing. How did we end up in the same house?
I exit the basement; I brave the wildfire world. Seasoning by fire peppers the hills. Lose your glasses and you may think it was the city skyline. Fire doesn’t burn everything—it has some standards. It targets weakness; fire is a martial arts master, all movements necessary and all movements only necessary, the hands go for arteries, joints, sinew, its opponent disabled more than defeated. The crumbling happens when the fire’s work is done. By now, the fire has worked down the hill and looms in the wild space just beyond the urban sprawl, working steadily. The trees, the pampered nature as pet stands between the town and the smoke, each tree an untrained minion the fire strikes down with one flick of the elbow or sweep of the ankle.
Howie doesn’t have far to go. Or, he couldn’t have. Either possibly face someone already smaller than him or face the fire. I’m betting he took a right from the house. When I first saw him, he held the square of tinfoil in his right hand.
I walk down the center of the road, one which buckles just a millimeter or two. Fresh snow, that’s what my feet try to recognize. With every breath I’m camping, and eventually I pull my shirt up over my nose. Sounds like too much trouble, but it’s my bag. There’s me and there’s my bag. Might as well chop a leg off. Howie must see a version of reason—he knows how to smoke.
At the end of the road, the next junction (I go right again) I’m suddenly surrounded by Howie. Smoke falls down in a parachute, waits in the treetops, the atmosphere level that always looks low enough to reach up and touch. A tear irritates out, wets the shirt load bearing on the bridge of my nose. The smoke is beating me town, turning my eyes red, flying my lungs south for the winter. I can’t match the fire in power but I match it in determination. I keep walking. Faster.
And there’s Howie. On the sidewalk to my left, a hundred yards down. My bag rubs shoulders with his. He walks under street lamps, on, unlike the last couple roads, as if pointing in his direction for me. Officer, he went that way. My shirt falls from my nose, and a tear runs free to my lips. We’re in no rush. He can run when he sees me—to the right, the woods that make up these homes’ backyards, the place with all the fire. Or he can try the left, into the city, where this can be more than our problem.
He looks back, really wanting to see the wafting, black smoke under the pierce of the lamps, and he sees me. Still centered with the road, and I see me like he does. Eyes irritated and tearing, face wet, flakes of coagulated firestuff powdering my cheeks. Still. Bagless and looking at my bag, right now.
I watch my bag hit the sidewalk. On the path of least resistance, Howie lets go of all my bags’ worthlessness, perhaps overwhelmed by the idea that it matters to anyone else. It’s so quick I can’t pick up on any malice, intentional wrongdoing. As if we’ve been playing a game, out here, in the apocalypse. On his way out he flashes a baggie of hospital masks. Classic bone white with the cold, blue filter. A swipe like he’s unloading the magazine on a gun, he floats a single mask onto my bag, and he keeps walking. Thank you, Howie. Or no thank you. I’m really not picky.
The mask is damp the moment it fixes on my face. Not a bad feeling, right now. While my bag is sooty I welcome the pressure on my shoulders. I look up at the light. Must be something, to catch Howie’s attention. And it sort of is. With the moon clocked out, how the lamp cuts through the smoke reminds me of the hierarchy, here. The benevolent fire. A memory unto itself, and really the final stage of every memory. The last thing our brains will see—a total expiry of everything on the shelf. Unto itself, fire is a memory. And I get caught up in the lamp, the dazzles of smoke shaking feathers in front of their showgirl, my head tilted all the way back.
Dolly out.
Author Bio
Alden Nagel is a bald writer and graduate candidate of Literary Arts at Central Washington University. His work has been published in Manastash Literary Journal, Punch Projects, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. Originally from Seattle, he now resides in Ellensburg. He is currently working on a book of non-fiction.
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