STEPHEN WUNDERLI

The Birdwatcher

Lydia turned her head to the window. The sky was pallid. The fire, only a few miles away, had moved on. Angry ember streams pulsing on the face of the Laramie mountains had subsided into slow exhales of gray smoke that shrouded the valley. The wind had roiled across the basin, laying smoke on the town of Casper, an unwelcome night that wouldn’t leave. “It’s the last thing you should do.”

“Just to see what’s there, if anything. I can’t sit anymore,” Ted said to his wife.

“You mean with me.”

“Don’t wait up.”

The dark skin of Lydia’s Arapahoe body had been sponged quickly for ash and dabbed with iodine across blistered cheeks, the warpaint of the hospital. An oxygen tube fastened beneath her nostrils. She unlaced the leather tie of her ponytail with one hand and hummed hoarsely to herself, dragging her fingers through black hair too stiff for her young age. Out of the other forearm, bandaged tight like a horse’s shinbone, emerged the IV tube for hydration and antibiotics against infection. This was the longest she had stayed in bed since they moved from town to the woods. Ten years of dawn to dusk chores. It’s the last thing you should do. The first words she had spoken since she came out of the burn unit and was propped up in the hospital bed in the hallway because the rooms were for deeper wounds, the kind that left scars like flagellated skin. Her lungs were branded. Her left hand was bandaged from punching through the flaming wall of the woodshed where the dog had somehow got when it ran off in a panic.

“It’s my fault,” she had said, coughing, her hand blistered.

“The dog wasn’t worth it,” he said back. It had not been a dramatic escape from the inferno a few days earlier. He had chopped a fire line around the house and thrown earth against the timber foundation until it raked down from the slats. But it wasn’t enough. The fire didn’t crawl along the ground, it dropped from the sky, from the deadfall that became airborne with the heat, coals raining down on shake shingles and bare porches. He beat at the flames with wool blankets, shoveled more dirt, but it wasn’t enough. He was the last one to climb in the truck, to cough through the smoke, the engine sputtering for clean air, the old Ford pushing into a traffic jam on the highway where a few firetrucks sprayed down the cars for embers and a water truck wet the shoulder while homes slowly collapsed in flames behind them.

“What about James?”

“I’ll take him with me. He should see.”

“He shouldn’t go with you.”

“I’m his father.”

Lydia tried to call out to him when he turned, but Ted had already grabbed James by the arm and the two bumped their way through the train of beds parked in the hallway and the press of family beside them and the nurses in blue moving like ticket-takers between stops.

“Your mother wants me to see if there is anything left,” he told the boy. James was nine-years old and had just learned to identify quail tracks by their faint scratches in the soft loam and the bowls they dug with their shuddering bodies hoping to draw out bugs. The week before he had crept carefully through the underbrush, uncovering a nest stacked with small eggs under the watch of the mother nearby.

“Do you think the quail have got away?”

“No. Nothing gets away.”

Ted was accustomed to walking on uneven ground. Striding across the parking lot made him uneasy, the flatness of it made him mistrust his own footsteps. He guided James to the truck with his thick hand pressing against the back of the boy’s thin shoulder blades. Ted had become more at ease with an axe handle in his hands than the tender arm of a young boy, more at home in the delicate sounds of the woods than the manufactured noises of the Barstow filling station where he grew up, surrounded by asphalt and combustion, the thud of a wrench against his back from his enraged father. Ted could not live with people he mistrusted, and that was most. “The boy doesn’t need fractures to learn lessons,” he told Lydia. “He needs the scuffs of living, not the punishment of some unknown sin.”

James looked up at his father but didn’t ask questions. His father was taut as fence wire, his eyes clenched from ten years staring into the wind.

“I would never hurt you,” he said to his boy.

The boy nodded.

***

The fires had come. It was their season, he expected that much, but the flames had blown past their usual boundaries and come upon the small town like Grendel in the night, torching this home and not that one, this barn but not that shed.

Everyone refused to leave. It was home. If it was going to burn, they wanted to stay and fight, do what they could. It was no use; the flames drove them out anyway and clogged the highway with a wave of surrender. Ted had built the home himself, hoisting the beams alone, with a rig of pulleys and hemp rope. He set every post, painted every piece of siding. He would see it catch fire for himself before he finally gave up.

Lydia threatened to leave before the fires. “You can have the house,” she’d said. She threw her bag of clothes onto the porch, scattering the quail that had ventured onto the boards where she had spilled cornmeal in her anger. “A boy needs school to learn things. He needs more than scat and velvet antlers to teach him. He needs a few books, Judas Ted! He could use more than your lectures on seed and whorling disease and alkaline soil, and God help us if he finds friends his own age!”

***

The boy was watching the landscape as they moved away from the hospital.

“The fire isn’t coming this way. It’s moved on.”

“Why did it come after us?”

“It’s just how fires are. Unpredictable.”

They rolled out of town, crossed the North Platte River and followed a fire road toward the settlement that had become their home away from the sprinkler-piped developments with their food franchises and synthetic stucco. The settlement was a place people could live in solitude with no need for window shades because the space between neighbors was too great to see. And nobody cared about your business unless they had news about a mountain lion or the coming increase in the price of propane. Father and son idled past onlookers in yards set up in lawn chairs like they did on the fourth of July. Damned if any one of them had ever swung a pick or dug their own well. Ted hated them for being the offspring of ease. He drove defiantly toward the veil of smoke hanging on the settlement. He was stopped on the highway by the fire crew from the next county over.

“You can’t go this way.”

“Here to run the water truck,” Ted lied, unfolding his volunteer Search and Rescue ID. The man in the clean uniform looked at them both. “Hell of a fire. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“Not today you won’t. We got a missing smokejumper up there. Wouldn’t be good for the boy if you know what I mean.”

“The boy is fine.”

“Go back,” the man said. “Wait for the all clear. That’s not an ask, it’s an order.”

Ted looked hard at the man. “Well. It’s not you that’s lost everything.” The rear wheels engaged and spun on the shoulder. The nose of the truck dipped down into the ditch, submerged behind a police cruiser and breached the haze beyond and skidded onto the road. “It’s home,” Ted said to James. “Nobody's gonna take that away from us. Understand?”

James nodded in the passenger seat while he watched the man in the clean uniform fan the dust from his eyes and talk on his radio.

They reached the stone bridge that crossed a dry arroyo marking the beginning of the settlement. Everything was charred and still smoldering. This is as far as Lydia had gotten on her first run at leaving. She told him he was stubborn. He told her what’s right is right and everything else is weakness. She wept and stood there alone, eventually walking the gravel road back to the house. “I have nowhere to go,” she told her son. “I need you to love me. I never had a mother to love me. Can you do that for me?”

James stared into her eyes. “Are we going?”

“I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure anymore.”

James held his mother’s arm and felt the pulse of her body as it held back the currents that wanted to break forth.

“I've only seen a few boys grow up like this, without schools, in the woods. It didn’t work out for them.”

The two sat in the small room with hand stitched quilts draped across the bed posts saying nothing else until Ted stomped up the front porch stairs, kicked the bag she packed across the boards and banged open the front door. He’d been checking coyote traps, something that always satisfied him. “They just feed off the work of others,” he taught his son. “They need to be killed.” He dropped a bent trap on the floor and the chain jangled like shackles. He walked into the small bedroom and stared at the two.

“My son needed me,” Lydia said.

“He should have come with me to see why the traps were empty.”

“The two of us should have left.”

Ted took the boy by the arm and told him to go find the dog that had gone off again, rooting in the undergrowth for rodent carcasses.

“It’s a waste of time, all these fights,” Ted said.

“Up here is harsh enough,” Lydia said. “You don’t have to be harsh with me. I just see his education different than you.”

“What else should the boy learn?”

“He could learn to talk to other kids his age. It would do him good.”

Ted walked out of the room and picked up the trap and made his way to the workshop.

***

The air burned at Ted’s eyes. Only the foundation of the first house remained, blackened bricks and chimney that had fallen over and lay like a shipwreck in the living room. He idled the truck forward across the baked road. James was pale and wide-eyed and moved his head slowly, fixing on porches he used to cross on his honey route that were collapsed and yawing.

“A hell of a fire,” the father said.

The boy could say nothing. Ashes were making their way into the cab of the truck and swirling like gnats. He fanned them away from his face. Ted wiped the condensation off the inside of the windshield so he could see more clearly.

***

“Love is the only thing that matters,” she had said to her son. “But it works both ways or it doesn’t work at all, so you have to keep looking.”

Ted overheard this in the early night while she was sitting on the edge of the boy’s bed, the edge of leaving. He spent the night on the porch with his head on the bag, forming sentences that would bring it all back, like circling around the trap line and ending up home again. The fires were a safe distance then. He could start again. He could say things his own father had never said. But the winds changed and tore at his face. The red lights arrived soon after and the man in the uniform asked him if the bag was the only thing he was taking and if there was anyone else in the house.

“I’m not leaving,” he’d said back, not mentioning that the bag was Lydia's, not his.

“It’s the smoke that will kill you,” the man said.

“No one is leaving!” Ted yelled at the man.

***

The brakes complained to a stop in front of their house. The timber frame had held, but nothing else. Walls and roof were gone. The sofa skeleton was all that remained inside. Everything else was a pile of smoldering firewood. “Let’s have a look,” he said to the boy, but James was slow to exit. He tested the ground with his boots as if they would explode into flames. The stone steps were still standing. The two kicked up ashen dust as they walked but dared not enter. James edged carefully along the side of the house where the quail had once made their run. Ted squatted on his haunches and surveyed the remains, trying to read the entrails of a sacrificed animal for some kind of sign, an omen that would guide the next thing he should do. “Everything panics in a fire,” Ted taught his son. “Run straight into the flames.”

“Look,” the boy said. “Someone is there.” He was pointing to a hundred-foot lodgepole pine undressed by the fire and soot black. It was out seventy yards or so. Up high there was a body knocking against the trunk, stiff and lifeless, unveiled by the parting of smoke. A black shroud flapped behind it. The figure was also blackened and a tangle of rope around the neck and right arm strung around a branch above caused the head to cock to the right. The legs hung freely, swaying like a wind chime.

“Who is it?” The boy asked.

The father stood and looked. “A birdwatcher,” he answered. “Just a birdwatcher.”

“Will he come down?”

“Maybe. It’s been a hell of a fire.”

“And he just watches?”

“It’s all he can do. Watch. And wait for the birds to return.”