The Burning Season

The cabin was dark then a light flickered inside. Flames filled the windows and wormed at the sash; the glass blackened and shattered. Smoke poured out and drifted over the fields, the marshlands, and the creek and formed a dark ribbon at the base of the three hills that separated the Dorner land from the main road. Sometime after midnight the wind picked up and the trees on the mountainsides whispered and bent to it. The smoke was pushed beyond the hills and settled against the walls of the Finnish church and in the small graveyard nearby, but by then the fire was only a flicker, and the cabin was gone.Bandy Dorner woke to a fogged windshield, cracked and spattered with mud and grass, the watery shadows of two policemen banging on his car hood with their fists. He opened the car door with his shoulder and fell into the canal. The shock of the water stole his breath and when he went to stand the strong current knocked him down. He dug his hands into the mud bank and pulled himself up to flat ground and stood dripping. The fog was nearly as dense outside of the car as it was within and it took him a few seconds to orient himself. The barbed wire from the fence he’d driven through was tangled up in his rear axle and strung across the field with some of the posts still attached.

“You can’t prove a thing,” Bandy said. He knew the two policemen and didn’t like them. Turner was the tall man’s name; Meeks was the shorter.

“I care about proof,” Turner said.

Meeks took a toothpick from his breast pocket and slipped it into his mouth. “We got your bed ready in town. It ain’t even pissed in. Yet.” He smiled and the toothpick pointed skyward. Bandy slapped the water and mud from his pants. “Go on, leave me alone. I’ll fix the damn fence. It’s not like I hurt anybody. Yet.” He smiled and went toward them and they stepped aside and he walked between, a few inches taller than Turner.

“Go up there and load yourself into the backseat of that car and we’ll be fine,” Turner called after him. “We ain’t wrestling with you again.”

Bandy ignored him. Dead grass snared his boots and made him stumble. He didn’t feel well. He touched his back pocket to see if his wallet was there and it was. He didn’t bother taking it out and looking inside because it was empty. He’d have liked to get home before Iona woke up, but it didn’t really matter. He could do as he pleased. They’d argued before he left for the bar. Going home was exactly what he’d been avoiding.

He walked through a dense belt of fog into a lesser pocket and saw his father standing in the ditch bottom with his fists clenched on the top wire of the fence. On the road behind him the haggard ranch truck that Iona usually drove was parked in front of the police car, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t see her. The gumdrop light turned and sounded out the closeness of the fog. Meeks and Turner followed Bandy at some distance and spoke quietly to one another; what they said he couldn’t hear.

It occurred to him that he’d been dreaming of the mill fire before the police woke him. He’d been a boy when it burned and hadn’t seen the actual fire, only the aftermath: the slow collapse of the town. In the dream, the fire raged in the mill and the ripe colors of the flames danced in the night and painted the glass surface of the lake. There was the sound of snapping cables and creaking timbers then the tower tilted and fell to the ground with such force that a single wave left the shoreline, only a few inches high, but it lifted the logs in the booming grounds one after the other and ran across the water with the silent determination of a falling star. The fence wire was loose and the staples half pulled in the crisp and rotting posts. Bandy spread the wires and ducked through but he was too big and a barb tore the back of his shirt and gave him a rosary bead scratch just above his belt. Jack Dorner stayed fixed as a statue and watched him. He looked tired, like he’d been up. Bandy wanted to be easy with the old man but the tension was there always and had been getting worse. He pointed at the ranch truck. “How’s Iona supposed to get around if you steal her rig?” His father drew back a little as if he’d seen something terrible over his son’s shoulder. Bandy turned but it was only the policemen and the fog behind him. “What’s wrong with you?” he said to his father. “You don’t like my shortcut?”

The old man’s eyes dulled and he shook his head. Bandy picked up a stick from the ditch and carefully made his way up the steep bank onto the road. Black, gummy hunks of mud fell from his boots with every step. He hopped onto the hood of the cop car and dented it and fuck their car along with them. He crossed his legs and held onto his boot with one hand and rooted the mud out with the stick. His father still hadn’t moved.

The cops took turns holding the fence wires for one another like they were cocking a crossbow. Their shoes were slick-soled and it took them several tries to make it from the borrow pit to the road. The old man followed them, mechanically kicking the toes of his boots into the soft earth for leverage. He made it to flat ground and touched his forehead and brushed his hand across his chest then looked at Bandy.

“It’s my car and I crashed it,” Bandy said to him. “There’s no reason for you to be out here. This is a young man’s game.”

“Some game.”

Bandy smiled at that and finished with his boots and threw the stick over the fence into the field. “Nothing for you,” he said, blinking.

“God, I’m still drunk.” He turned and noticed the rip in his shirt and touched it, held up two bloody fingers. “Cut myself. You see that? Sonofabitch.” He smeared his blood on the cop car, made an X.

“I sent for these police,” his father said.

Bandy looked at the old man, not really believing him. “That’s a rotten thing to do. Even to me.”

Jack Dorner showed his teeth, not a smile. “You certainly pick your days.” He poked a finger into the corner of his eye then held it out and looked at it, at Bandy. “Son, last night, out of all of them, you should’ve been at home.”

“Well, I’m headed there now. That’ll have to do.”

“It’s too late.” The old man retrieved his pink, once red, kerchief from his back pocket and wiped his hands then stepped back and waved the cops in. “Go to it,” he said.

Meeks stayed where he was while Turner circled around. Bandy scooted off the hood and the blood went to his head, his whole body felt unstable and hollow.

“I’m doing you a favor,” his father said. “Someday you’ll realize that.”

“I don’t need your favors.”

“You go with these two and you might avoid doing any real harm. To anyone. You’re going to need time to think, Bandy- boy.”

“Don’t call me that. I ain’t a boy,” he said. Meeks spit out his toothpick and took a few herky side steps then stopped when Bandy looked at him. Turner was in a wrestling stance, slowly making his way forward. Bandy was ready for it: He wanted a fight.

Jack Dorner shook his head, blinked. “Does it even matter what I call you? You don’t ever listen.” The old man folded his kerchief and put it in his back pocket. “There was a fire,” he said.

“What fire?”

“It was the cabin. The cabin burned down while me and your mother were in Boise. We didn’t get home till late. We must’ve drove right by you out here. We didn’t see you. It was pretty much over by then anyway. Nobody could’ve done anything.” He slumped his shoulders and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. Bandy suddenly understood what it all meant, his father, the police. He wondered if it was the smoke from the cabin that had gifted him the dream of the mill fire.

“Her rig was there,” his father said, thumbing at the pickup behind him. “She might be gone.”

Adeep, buried fear came up from the ground through Bandy’s feet and it was like watching the guts drop out of a strung up animal, standing there realizing that she’d burned and I was in the bar while she burned then sleeping, drunk in the car sleeping while she burned. “She wasn’t with me,” Bandy said. “I wasn’t with her.”

Turner caught him by the wrist and startled him. Bandy snatched his arm free and hooked the cop in the stomach, threw his weight into him, and knocked him to the ground. Meeks came forward and Bandy lunged and struck the smaller man in the jaw and sent him stumbling backward down the embankment into the ditch bottom. Bandy’s father was saying something but Bandy wasn’t listening. He wanted to kill somebody; the urge filled him and carried him on. He went and stood over Turner and without thinking anything besides don’t break your hand, he held him by the back of his collar and punched him over and over in the back of the head until he quit struggling then he grabbed him by the hair and ground his face into the dirt and felt the pop of his nose as it broke from the pressure. When he’d finished he stood and leaned back and looked into the white of the fog and the low torn clouds like ghosts. The dream of the mill entered his mind: the wave and the smoke. Meeks made his way back up from the ditch and stood with his pistol drawn and told Bandy to get down on the ground. The old man told him to wait, to just hold on a second. “Put the gun away,” he said.

“Look what he did to my partner.” Turner wasn’t moving. “You be good, you big bastard,” Meeks said to Bandy. “Or I’ll shoot. I swear I will.”

Bandy looked at the pistol and at the cop’s eyes and he didn’t care. He crossed the distance in three quick steps and palmed the gun and wrenched it away and it went off. Meeks fell to the ground with a hole in his shirt above his liver. Jack Dorner caught his son by the shoulders and tried to pull him away but Bandy turned and pushed the old man in the chest and he fell back and rolled to his side as stiff as a length of kinked wire.

 “You want to shoot me too?” he said, righting himself.

“No.” Bandy held the familiar weight loosely in his hand. He couldn’t meet his father’s eyes. He turned to Meeks on the ground and he could see the silver and gold fillings in the man’s teeth as he yawned for breath. He had vague thoughts of mercy and compassion, but it was over. He lifted the gun and shot the policeman in the forehead. The man snapped to attention then went limp. The shot roared and faded.

His father hacked out a series of thick, cancerous coughs as he got up from the road. He went toward his son with his arm outstretched for the pistol but Bandy wouldn’t give it to him. “I meant to help you. I meant to keep you safe.” He turned up his hands then squatted down on his heels and rested his elbows on his knees. “You did your best.” Bandy tipped the gun and studied it, looked at his father. “Is she really gone?”

His father nodded at the road.

Bandy dropped the gun at his feet. There was nothing to be done.

Behind him Turner opened his eyes and wiped the gravel from his mouth. He lifted his head, blood poured from his nose. He got to his knees and brought up his pistol, leveled it and fired. That shot and the next were wild, but the third ripped through Bandy’s shoulder as he was reaching for the gun on the road. The bullet buried itself in the meat of his chest and he fell to his knees then slumped facedown in the gravel.

Jack Dorner knelt between the dead policeman and his son. The sun burned through the fog. The new light went down the roadway and on like a cracked door against the pastureland hills. Fool’s gold scales glimmered in the wet dirt, sparking like ocean swell. And there was the graveyard in the distance with its lowly stones and across the road the one- room church, freshly painted, as white as the fog had been, whiter: fog manifest.

“Look what you did,” the old man said, and at first it seemed that he was talking to the dead man. “Look what you finally did.”

Excerpted from Then Came the Evening © Copyright 2012 by Brian Hart. Reprinted with permission by Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved.