Realistic fiction, 4600 words. Written June 2018. Revised to post here, exactly two years later.
Some mechanical sound rumbled across the hills the day Gila National Forest burned. Or really, one of the many days that forest burned. Firefighters could already be encamped in anticipation. Maybe they were digging firebreaks, big furrows in the earth with nothing to burn. They would be to the advancing flames like a castle moat to besieging invaders.
The noise cut off. Lawry strained his ears to listen for absent birdsong. Hard to pretend this trip wasn’t impulsive when faced with the silence of an empty forest around him, with nothing to distract from his thoughts. He had about twenty minutes to go before he’d miss the next check-in with Karla. Last time he texted her, he was gassing up in Phoenix, filling the tank that later sat sloshing on the tow truck’s hook after his timing belt snapped back at the state line. His phone died not long after.
She’d wanted to know what to say to his mother. Lawry never had an answer to that question, but it was easy to be optimistic when he was wolfing down a hotdog in a bustling gas station. Too much of a time-crunch to check what all Mom heard on Facebook now, he’d said. Give him a chance to reach New Mexico and then he’d handle things. He told Karla to put the whole delay on his shoulders—let Mom think he wasn’t talking to his own wife.
All their friends thought he was nuts for driving out here. Karla was the only one on his side. When they saw the plumes of smoke rising on the news last week she’d said, hey, does that make ten or eleven wildfires this summer? Totally nonchalant: her radar barely blipped when the anchorman said Gila National Forest.
Karla went back to circling his shoulders with soft, warm fingers even as ice sank into his gut. Because Gila meant something to him.
After four days of watching the fire, he asked for time off work. It hadn’t seemed so bad at first, with the top Google results all referring to the burn in 2012, sparked by lightning on a dry spring when he was too young to watch the news. Apparently called the Whitewater-Baldy complex fire, which made him chuckle at the irony. Then he read that was just the name of the mountain, and that almost three hundred thousand acres had burned.
Lawry did a wildfire unit in sophomore history class, mandated by the state, but by then Whitewater-Baldy didn’t merit a mention. The west had close to thirty larger fires in the intervening years. Six of them in New Mexico, another eleven in his native California. No one’s got the headspace for all that. The tragedies of yesteryear live online, archived by Wikipedia, news sites, and the USDA Forest Service. Scrolling through the statistics brought back some of the knowledge that he’d been tested on as a teen, not that any of it stuck with him after he closed the tabs and went back to work.
Every summer it was the same fug of smoke choking the air, the same distant sirens and clogged highways and full motels. Fireworks on the Fourth of July were a thing of the past. The countryside dried to tinder and burned as regularly as the Earth turned.
Lawry’s phone received push notifications from his carrier twice daily. Traffic, temperature, precipitation, fire warnings, pollen index. Always in that order, always left to sit on his lock screen until he swiped them away without reading. He spent a couple minutes trying to find the settings to turn them off once, before he got distracted and forgot.
Suze wouldn’t have seen a single warning. That’s why Lawry was out here now, following up a nine-hour drive with a hike through the woods. At least all the traffic was headed in the opposite direction. The tow truck likely wouldn’t have agreed to haul him further into Gila, otherwise. The little town it dragged his car to was only under voluntary evacuation. They’d zipped past a snaking line of crawling cars and reached it in no time at all.
Gila National Forest was beautiful even under a blanket of charcoal gray. Bare trees loomed on either side of the road, messy, organic tangles of twigs in slate and brown. Lawry was reminded of sneaking into an empty cathedral on a weekday—dark walls stretching up to a vaulted ceiling overhead, anxiety echoing in the silence. He felt enclosed in this open space, safe despite the fire he knew was roaring mere miles away.
It had only taken a few minutes of walking to leave the town behind. The headache he’d been nursing since hour three of his road trip ebbed. Something about being alone in an empty forest was like a salve for his brain. Without any cars or buildings around it, was easy to imagine that he was seeing Gila as it was hundreds of years ago. The only things out of place were him and the empty stripe of road disappearing into the trees.
And the orange glow playing on the dark clouds overhead.
Desiccated husks of leaves peppered the asphalt, crunching under his sneakers and puncturing the silence. Smoky air gusted around him, acrid and shot through with spurts of ash. Still tasted fresher than the exhaust-fume taint of rush hour in the city.
Without GPS, Lawry had no idea how much hiking he was in for. He’d planned to drive the whole way and hadn’t packed sunscreen or extra batteries or anything. He sipped from his water bottle, trying to make it last.
It would only take him fifteen minutes to walk back to the garage. He could sit in the air-conditioned waiting room and charge his phone until his car was fixed, then be back home to Karla in the early morning. That’d be the sane thing to do. Suze would never know he made the trip.
Suze wasn’t online, so she’d never see her ex-friends’ concern, or them berating him for this harebrained trip. She shut down her social media eight months ago. Sold her phone and her TV, broke her lease, and moved away to a campground in the RV her mom left her. Lawry didn’t have a physical address to send her letters. He only knew where she was parked because she told him she’d paid through the year, and because that was pretty much the last of her money. She couldn’t afford to have gone anywhere else.
He wanted to be done bailing Suze out. Running interventions shouldn’t be on his shoulders anymore. Four years divorced, two years remarried, and Lawry blistered himself for her once again. He stopped to crouch on the side of the road, peeled his sock clear of the sticky fluid leaking from his ankle and slapped a band-aid over the raw skin. He could be back at the garage in twenty minutes.
An RV trundled past him, heading towards town and probably out of the park altogether. He could tell at a glance that it was too nice and new to be Suze’s. He knew how the conversation would’ve gone for any neighbors at the campgrounds trying to warn her about the fire. She would’ve met them with undeserved mistrust and hostility, and a good dash of paranoia thrown in to boot. Suze was always terrible at making new acquaintances. She made getting to know her a chore; she was awful with people, quick to state point blank that she expected the worst from them.
The fact that she’d been in love with Lawry anyway used to make him feel special.
He couldn’t remember how far out of town the campgrounds were supposed to be. Good thing there was only one road. One way to go, really; Lawry had come too far to turn around.
Karla couldn’t take off work, and nobody else cared enough to put themselves out for Suze anymore. Not after all the bridges she’d burned. But now Lawry was alone in his mission, with no way to contact her or anyone. The trees all looked the same to his eyes. Drought had parched their foliage and stripped their limbs. Not that Lawry could’ve told an aspen from a juniper anyway. He was used to quick jaunts between bus stops and air-conditioned buildings, only seeing trees in planters ringed by concrete. It’d been a good five years since he’d been out in a forest like this.
That last trip was because of Suze too, he realized, plodding resolutely deeper into the woods. Lawry had just flunked out of college after a semester of academic probation. He’d been living with a pair of guys that seemed like true friends until the weed-rank stench of their rooms permeated the whole apartment. Their parties spilled into the public spaces, crusting the carpet and walls with fetid gunk from drinks and other fluids. Lawry escaped to Suze’s mom’s place more and more, but he couldn’t bring himself to study then either. It was so easy to let lectures slip past, cuddled in front of the TV with her legs pillowing his head and her fingers stroking his hair.
He hadn’t been furious with himself when he was expelled because he hadn’t felt anything for months. It was Karla who eventually told him to talk to a therapist about depression. But, before her, when he stared blankly at the five-digit number on his phone screen, the debt that felt too abstract for emotion even when it was the most important thing in his life? He’d told Suze he couldn’t imagine going on, not expecting her to help.
She surprised him. Suze led him to her mother’s El Dorado and buckled him in like a kid barely old enough to move his own legs. She drove them to San Jacinto State Park, the first day trip they’d taken together. He’d never been before—the park sat just outside the boundaries of his life. Lawry called himself an idiot for not realizing that he could have visited whenever. An hour’s drive outside the city shouldn’t have felt as unreachable as the moon.
Gila only reminded him of San Jacinto because he had so few similar experiences. For one thing, San Jacinto State Park had been packed when they drove up. He’d felt like the trip was a mistake immediately. That impression sunk in as they circled for parking, Suze swearing under her breath and nausea clenching his stomach. Suze hated dealing with crowds; Lawry hadn’t planned this venture, but guilt still wound him tight.
They’d hiked. He’d been too overwhelmed by the noisy tourists and beating sun to take in the scenery. He had the impression of green, stately trees surrounded by patches of scrubby grass, but what he remembered most strongly were the sharp pebbles of gravel that kept bouncing into his sandals to stick between his toes and under his feet. He learned enough from that experience to wear sneakers into Gila, but he should’ve gotten thicker socks as well; his were wearing into holes that framed patches of raw skin.
Lawry never dreamed Suze would run off to live in the woods. Her comfort zone was her mother’s couch, and she spent most of her time watching TV. When she first said she was researching the RV life, he didn’t believe her. He chalked her uncharacteristic behavior up to some weird expression of grief at her mother’s death. It was one thing to struggle with the reality that she was going to lose their house because she couldn’t afford the rent. But moving to New Mexico in an RV wasn’t exactly a reasonable next step.
Suze never was a reasonable person. Not like Karla, with how she ferociously laid out problems line-by-line in neat little T-charts. Positives and negatives, debt and stress and hard decisions delineated in tidy handwriting with painted nails tapping her pen and her mouth a grim slash of lipstick. Lawry figured that he and Suze didn’t work out because they were both too afraid of pain. Having nothing but bad choices overwhelmed them, and they took it out on each other. Karla had real presence of mind, and a drive to claw her way to a better future, one sacrifice at a time. Lawry and Suze had just curled up like kicked dogs, cloistered themselves and ignored the outside world until the consequences knocked at the door.
The parched forest was so quiet that Lawry could imagine he heard the crackle of fire in the distance. He must’ve missed the rush of evacuees; only three vehicles had passed him in forty minutes. One of them wasn’t an RV, but Lawry figured they were all from the campgrounds. There wasn’t anything else around for miles. Maybe that’s why it made sense for Suze to move to Gila. Maybe she really was happy out here, as far removed from the expectations of modern society as she could get.
Suze had yelled at their principal when she was forced to take summer classes before she could graduate high school, yelled at her family when she was told to get a job, and, finally, yelled at Lawry when he said he didn’t want to be a married man freeloading off his mother-in-law. It would be just like her to stay crouched in her RV while she watched her neighbors drive off. Lawry didn’t doubt for a second that she was more scared of people than fire.
The day they’d gone to San Jacinto, she’d gripped his hand so tightly that her nails dug little crescents into his skin. She’d dragged him up the mountain, navigating by avoiding the voices of other hikers, while his feet ached and his lungs heaved. The misery of his body finally cracked him open and he ducked behind a tree and cried for the life he’d ruined. Thousands of dollars squandered for maybe a couple dozen credit hours of straight C’s, a lease for a filthy apartment he hadn’t set foot in for three weeks, and no prospects of any kind. Suze planted herself at the side of the path to block peoples’ view and give him some privacy. Lawry had no doubt she wore a twisted snarl like a guard dog, drawing attention to them with her aggressive mistrust of strangers’ indifference.
Then a miracle happened. Heavy clouds swept up the mountain cinematically fast, rumbling with the promise of rain. The other hikers vanished from the trail. Lawry emerged from the woods and the tear-tracks across his puffy face were washed away by a patter of clean water.
Suze took his hand gently. They watched the sky, pressed into each other from elbow to shoulder. Black clouds rolled overhead, torrents of wind rushing through the trees and shaking sprays of pine needles from their bows. Lawry could still recall the scent of mingled pine and ozone with perfect clarity. Rain soaked into his scalp, plastered his shirt to his chest and ran down into his sandals, rinsing away dirt and sweat.
He glanced over to Suze and was transfixed. Her face was upturned in rapture. Water ran in rivulets from her bangs and down her neck, soaking into her t-shirt, gone transparent over her bra. She was at peace in a way he’d never seen. The wind whipped and the trees around them creaked and groaned. The forest filled with the sound of snapping wood and booming thunder and she laughed, carefree and beautiful for it.
Suze caught him watching and pressed her hand into the back of his neck. She drew him down to her height, shivering with tension, and kissed him deeply. They made out, her lips and tongue hot amidst icy needles of battering rain. Wind tugged at his body around Suze’s hands, threatening to tear them off the side of the mountain—but he felt like they might float.
He asked Suze to marry him and thunder drowned out his words. He repeated himself at a shout and she cut him off to sing yes, yes, yes, a paean stolen away by rushing wind until she pressed her lips against his throat and murmured it into his skin. A branch the size of his torso cracked free and blew past them, leaves shaking deafeningly. Lawry kissed her again, oblivious. In that moment nothing could touch him.
They never had a better moment together. The memories outlived their marriage. Lawry fulfilled his role as a buffer between Suze and everyone else in their life, making endless excuses whenever she was abrasive or rude or confrontational. He protected the world from her meltdowns until he didn’t have enough strength left to be her champion.
A few months of no contact with Suze, of quiet, peaceful nights with Karla, had at least bolstered him enough for this trip. Though maybe not enough for the unplanned hike. Lawry stepped off the road to lean against a tree and drain the last of his water. Dried sweat coated him from head to toe. He dragged a palm across his face, salt catching roughly against his fingers and stinging his lips.
Overhead, black clouds settled atop the trees. The breeze faded, leaving the air thick and stagnant. Lawry clicked his phone on mechanically and watched it load the manufacturer’s logo before dying again. The deep breath he drew in tasted like sweet woodsmoke. He was reminded of barbeque, and that he hadn’t eaten for hours. He let his empty water bottle drop to the ground and kicked it towards the tufts of dead grass. Then he pushed himself off the tree with a groan and plodded forward.
His face and neck were burned red and aching by the time the gentle curve of the road through Gila straightened enough to let him glimpse the campgrounds. He spotted a flat building on an elevated clearing in the distance, sided in beige, corrugated aluminum. Untidy columns of RVs and pickup trucks lined up along a chain-link fence.
The asphalt road swept past in a straight line, connected to the campgrounds only by a sloped ramp of packed dirt. And on that ramp sat Suze’s RV. It was unmistakable—a Leprechaun model with bunkspace perched like a pompadour above the cab, striped horizontally at chest level in teal and purple. Old enough to be out of style but not old enough to be vintage.
Suze’s RV was straddling the ramp and blocking the gate to the campgrounds. Lawry heard the engine rev, an unhealthy noise that grated like a chainsaw and failed to turn the wheels. A pickup truck with its side mirrors folded in scraped past. The truck rolled slowly off the side of the ramp, each tire hitting the ground with clamorous thumps that made the undercarriage creak. It fought for traction against the browned grass until its front tires bit into asphalt. The truck fishtailed onto the road and shot past Lawry. He turned to see the driver shove his arm out the window, middle finger pointing back towards Suze.
Lawry trudged up the incline and hugged the fence of the campgrounds on his approach, staying out of sight of her RV’s windows for the moment. The vehicles lined up behind her and the crowd milling about told the whole story. People were trying to leave, and Suze had them all trapped.
The man banging his fist on the hood of Suze’s engine barely gave Lawry a glance. His mustache dangled in points past the corners of his mouth, swaying as he shouted. The tinted windshield was an impassive barrier to his invective. Lawry knew Suze would be hunched over inside, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles and hiccupping through frustrated, terrified tears.
The other campers were no less angry. A couple dozen people were gathered, mostly seated in their cars or pressed against the building for shade. The woman driving the RV behind Suze’s was riding her bumper close enough to nudge it, engine trundling impatiently. Two teenage girls rapped insistently on the door to the Leprechaun’s living area. They informed Lawry that Suze had been stuck for upwards of half an hour. He barely managed to piece together questions for them, but they were eager to vent. One of them waved her phone under his nose—the evacuation was now mandatory. Threat level red, she said firmly, as if that explained everything.
The police would show up before too much longer. Maybe in an hour, another man mused, leaning against the side of the building. The sign above him read “Laundry, Showers, and Propane: Open to the Public”. His kids sat in the dirt next to him, playing handheld video games. He tapped ashes from his cigarette and ground them into the dirt with his boot. Some of his friends had tried to push Suze down the ramp, but she’d rolled up her windows and blared her horn until they backed off. Crazy woman.
Suze had made no friends here. In barely five minutes Lawry overheard the whole story. Long-term residents knew she’d been there for months. They didn’t know her name until the camp manager told them. They didn’t know what this Suzanna’s problem was. They’d been quick to call the police and were waiting out the delay. Drumming up a tow truck would take a while, they agreed, and the police were doubtlessly busy knocking on peoples’ doors ahead of the fire. Lawry wondered what the garage back in town would do with his car.
The campgrounds weren’t anything like Lawry had been picturing. He balled his fists in his pockets and walked up to the Leprechaun’s passenger door. Had Suze fled here expecting solitude, he wondered, only to find a community as demanding as any other? He had hoped she’d found her peace, out in the middle of nowhere. He’d been wrong.
Lawry pulled the door open just enough to slide into the cabin as soon as he heard the lock click. Slamming the door cut off everyone else’s shouts. The Leprechaun was sweltering, hot air blowing from the vents. Suze wouldn’t raise her face to look at him. He could only see the grease plastering her hair to her skull and the sweat beading on her forehead.
He took a moment to gather his thoughts before he spoke. “I was kind of scared to find you out here, y’know? I guess you don’t.”
Her temper had driven him to tears more than everything else in his life put together. But she looked defanged, exhausted, pathetic. “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he continued, as gently as possible. “How’re you doing, Sue-belle?”
“Fuck off,” she sniped.
But she’d let him into the cab. “Figured you were in trouble. My phone wouldn’t shut up about wildfire evacuations, and I know you don’t pay attention to any of that.”
“The sky’s black, it would take a real moron to miss the fire. I was leaving on my own.”
“Yeah, I guess I didn’t give you enough credit there. Those guys called the police, by the way. No clue what any cop would do to unstick you.”
He hadn’t known what shape the trouble would take, had had entirely wrong expectations for what her life was like now. But he’d been sure she could use a friend.
“You want to rub that in more?” Suze sobbed, choked and snotty. “The world’s handed me plenty of shit today, so you materialize out of thin air to shove my nose in it? Fuck, Lawry, just say you hate me. I know I’m a disaster.”
“Yeah,” Lawry said. That was the main point he made when they divorced—and what a vicious battle that had been. “You kind of are. But I’m here because I care anyway. You deserve to have someone out there who cares about you.”
“I hate you so much. Just—go. Leave. Where’s your car?”
“I never liked knowing you were alone out here. I know,” he waved a hand, trying to ward off Suze’s glare, “this was your choice. But it’s goddamn dangerous. Look. Look, just listen—”
Suze cut him off with a yell so furious that their audience outside the cab startled. Lawry grit his teeth and let her take out all the day’s stress on him. When her imprecations wound down, she finally listened.
In the end, Lawry had little to tell Suze that she couldn’t have gotten from one of her neighbors. If only she’d managed to grow into the kind of person who could handle simple conversation.
Falling in love with Karla had been utterly unremarkable—a slow build-up of chance meetings, exchanged pleasantries, mutual friends, and then shared laughter. He hadn’t thought she was especially beautiful. He’d still been hung up on Suze. They talked about his divorce proceedings on their first date.
But that was how Karla was—she waded into the flow of the world around her. She only relaxed against the current to gather strength to fight the tide a moment later. Lawry had learned more from her than the rest of his life put together.
He and Karla had no cinematic anything in their history, much less kisses on stormy mountains, but she made him a better man.
He won Suze over by speaking to her like Karla would’ve. Positive and negatives, neatly delineated, repeated until the facts sunk in through her hysteria. The Leprechaun was busted. The campground wasn’t safe. The clamoring strangers just wanted her out of the way.
Finally, he stepped out of the RV and commanded everyone to back off. He went around to the driver’s side, took Suze by the elbow, and helped her to the community center so she wouldn’t have to watch strangers roll her RV off the ramp. She cried herself out in the showers while he charged his cellphone.
“Hey hon,” he said, when Karla picked up. “Things are crazy here. Sorry I let my phone die. Hope Mom’s not too pissed.”
“Don’t worry about her. Just so long as you’re not dead,” Karla said. Her voice was the sweetest thing he’d heard all day. “What’s the Suze-news? Your GPS says you’re still in Gila, what happened there? Is she refusing to leave?”
“The only thing that’s gone right today is that we’re not breathing smoke just yet,” Lawry replied with a laugh. Suze’s footfalls, slapping against tile beyond the open door to the women’s bathroom, fell silent. “I’m about to call us a cab or something. My car broke down, it’s all the way back at a garage in Glenwood. And Suze’s RV is toast.”
Karla’s wince was audible. “I’ll get you a ride. You focus on her. She’s gotta be miserable.”
“Thanks,” Lawry said, heartfelt. “You’re my hero.”
“No, thank you for what you’re doing. I know she won’t say it. You’re a good friend to her.”
“I try to be. I dunno if she’d agree with you, but I’m doing my best.”
“You are.” Karla’s laugh pealed out of the speaker. Lawry looked up to see Suze standing in the doorway, watching him, water dripping from her hair onto her t-shirt. “I’m proud of you, you know that? Don’t tell her I said hi or anything—I don’t want to piss her off—but I was worried too. I’m glad you’re there for her. I’m gonna look into getting you evacuated real quick, I’ll call back when I have details.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
“When she calls back—” Suze started, the moment Lawry hung up. His grip on the phone tightened instinctively. But she looked so small still, and calmer than he’d seen in months. “Tell her I did say thank you. And thank you to her, too.”