HE COMES OUT of the dusk beneath the cottonwoods along the river, graceless, almost crouched. Bent forward at the waist, at any rate, a slow, deliberate lurch he’s developed over time so as not to fall over so often. Obscured beneath the black hood of his sweatshirt, his pink, baby-fat face can be startling when he emerges from the shadows. Sometimes like this he scares even me, and I can only imagine what his appearance must do to the teenagers parked along the boat access in the dark, drinking, fucking, smoking pot.
“Bads,” he says to me. Bats. “Nicklode?” Michelob. I’m drinking Rainier, but all beer to this boy is Michelob, from the television, and he wants one. I give him a beer, and though he’s not actually a boy, his mother doesn’t approve of his drinking any more than mine.
“Bats, eh?” I ask. “You sure they weren’t swallows?”
He shakes his head. “No, bads,” he says. “Fitch. Buds.” Fish. Bugs.
I realize that I’m mostly a convenience for his mother, the latest in a string of live-ins who’ll look after the boy in exchange for a place to live and the semblance of a relationship. I don’t mind, though, and I like to think that I do a pretty good job. I like the boy, who is 25 years old and as easygoing as they come. At the moment he’s hunched over the open window of the car door.
“Hop in,” I tell him. “Sit with me. Good country music on the radio.”
He grins, strikes a pose. “Bwoow slade shoes,” he sings, strumming an imaginary guitar, making like Elvis. He joins me in the car and offers a joke, sly.
“Knlock, knlock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Chlicken glabey.” Chicken Gravy.
“Chicken gravy who?”
“Chlicken glabey!” he shouts, and falls into me, laughing.
It’s an old joke of his, but I laugh anyway. It’s become genuinely funny by this time. Jokes to him are just funny words. He digs for a beef stick in the glove box and slurps his beer noisily.
His mother ties flies at Dan Bailey’s in Livingston, which is where I’d met her once upon a time, and she’s gone over to Bozeman for a few days to visit her hospitalized father. My back is fucked up, and I haven’t worked in four months, which is something of a sore spot with the boy’s mother, and getting sorer all the time. But, like I say, I like the arrangement with the boy just fine. We take a lot of drives together and he helps me out around the place; he’s a pretty good worker, and good company. We park out along the Yellowstone River most nights when the weather’s decent, and listen to country music or blues on the car’s tape deck. I smoke, drink beer, and try to think, and he likes to explore in the dark.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I ask him. “You wanna go into town and play the poker machines at the Mint?”
“Fiyo,” he says. Fire. The area just northwest of Yellowstone is burning up and he’s been fascinated by it on the television. I’ve been promising for days to take him into Yellowstone to see the fire.
“It’s too damn late,” I tell him, although it’s actually still relatively early.
“No,” he says, which comes out as a protracted moan. “Moh bedder.” More better.
It’s a cool early evening in late August, a big rusty moon already making its way up into the haze.
“You can’t tell your mother,” I say, and he assumes his cool, solemn expression to convey his understanding that a serious point is being made. I hold him there, just for fun, and he waits patiently for my okay. When he gets it he explodes.
“Yehwo!” he screams. Yes. He rubs his hands together, the thick, chapped skin rasping like sandpaper.
I grew up in Belgrade, but I’ve fished and camped in the park since I was a teenager. I’ve avoided this fire as I have all fires in the park. Fire is the element with which I have always been least comfortable. And I have seen the television footage of this one, the shots from overhead of the fire moving through the treetops, swirling, noisy, crashing fire lines and oozing over creek beds, crawling lazy and beautiful across ranch valleys. I have noticed as well the uneasy discrepancies between this terrifying footage and the cool-headed official assurances of the Park Service. All roads are open. Business as usual.
We drive down East River Road alongside the deep, layered shadows of the Absarokas, sprinklers working through the night out in the valley, cattle and horses out there grazing in the mist. We manage to pick up a radio station out of Alberta, Elmore James roaring through “Dust My Broom.” We stop off at a little roadside rest near Pray so the boy can take a piss. A white marble statue of the Virgin is there, a small red light glowing in her forehead, facing the empty highway with open arms.
In Gardiner we stop off at the K-Bar for beer. It’s a quiet night in the town, dogs lounging on the sidewalks, the shops and bars on the street above the park entrance mostly closed. There are a few tourists quietly strolling the streets, pausing here and there to check out the maps of the fire’s progress that are posted in the store windows. The scuttlebutt on the street is that evacuation is imminent in Silver Gate. It is a clear night in Gardiner, the only visible evidence of the fires a thick wall of smoke that’s completely overtaken the sky to the east.
“Any problems between Mammoth and Cooke City?” I ask the woman ranger at the north entrance.
“All roads are still open,” she says, administrative exhaustion and tension evident in her voice and abrupt manner.
We drive down through Mammoth, tourists mingling there with the elk herd on the lawn. Beyond Mammoth we drive into the settling haze and light, falling ash. In the Lamar Valley I pull off at a roadside fishing access near the fork of the Lamar River and Soda Butte creek. We get out of the car and just stand there for a minute, silent. There is a little gravel lip there just above the fork. I can hear the water moving below us, see where it reverses itself and heads off across the valley.
There are elk out there, standing stoic and shrouded in the haze. Ash continues to fall, cool, fine flakes tumbling like early snow. Occasional live cinders smolder tiny holes in my jacket. Army trucks trundle by on the road, headlights strobing ineffectual in the settling smoke. Helicopters drop toward the encampment in Cooke City.
The boy is quiet, circling, a fine, tight smile stretched across his face. He squints off across the valley, peering into the darkness that is settling now, the shifting opacity, confused by the muffled drone of the helicopters moving someplace above us.
“This is prehistoric,” I say to the boy. Towards Cooke City and Silver Gate you can now see the orange glow of the fire bleeding out of the general haze above the ridge. I have never been in the place when it was so eerily silent. The only close sound is the almost imperceptible murmur of the water moving through, and the nasal, labored breathing of the boy.
“Whayoh fiyo?” he asks. Where’s the fire.
“Close,” I tell him. “We’re almost surrounded by it. It’s in the backcountry beyond these ridges on both sides. See the orange there?” I point, and his eyes follow my finger. “That’s the Hellroaring fire. It’s a real big one.”
“Clows?” he asks. Cows.
“Yes,” I say. “There are cows back there. They’re probably moving them. Watering down the ranches.”
“Clows,” he says. “Mleet.” Cows. Meat. He liked these comfortable connections.
“Yes,” I say.
“Fitch?” he asks. Fish.
“Yes,” I tell him. “There are fish here, right here in this creek.”
“No,” he says. “You fitch. Fitching pohr.” Fishing pole.
I go to the car and assemble my fly rod and walk with the boy along the banks and down to a bend where the Soda Butte came crawling out of the long valley. I make a few casts and just let the fly carry downstream, throwing out line and letting it drift. The boy sits down next to a culvert and watches. The ash continues to fall and after a time I notice that the boy has fallen asleep, curled up, wheezing, in the fine gravel alongside the culvert.
I leave the boy sleeping and work my way further upstream, further into the stillness and the scrim of darkness. I become absorbed after a while, and find myself fishing in earnest, desperately juggling flies and peering intently down the rod. I want a hit. I want a fish to take back to the boy. I want to hear him say, “Fitch. Eat.” I want to show him that there are creatures still living in this dark water and things are not as bad as they seem and that I am not afraid of this sinister, creeping thing. I want to tell him, so that he can assure me once more, that this roaring I can feel and hear is not that fire chewing through the mountains, but that it is something inside me, and can be subdued.
Fantastic! Really enjoyed this.
Beautiful.