Holy Stokes Pt 3
REPORT WILDFIRES, insisted the sign that flew past the open window of the blue Volvo, its bleached wood catching the light like a shield left out in the sun. It was a relic of a more optimistic age, when the roads were still new, the people believed in each other, and you could call up the neatly-pressed ranger who had long ago set out on a great adventure - only to end up a desk jockey at the end of the earth with a gut that strained against the sage-green polyester of his uniform and a beard shot through with grey.
These days, the optimism was gone, the ranger either dead of old age or let go due to budget cuts, and the maps didn’t makes sense. The last place she’d stopped, Kalimova, was supposed to be a town of more than a thousand people, the kind of place that had a little mill, a mechanic, and a diner, which survived by the grace of international trade carried by the big rigs that rumbled constantly between the port cities in the Northwest and the Interior.
Instead, she found a single white building with green trim around the windows, set back a few hundred feet from the road. “Kal M ket,” said the sign on the roof. Burl’s, said the gas pumps out front.
Fuel depots were a precious rarity out here, so she fought the car off the road and aimed for one of the pumps. With the little blue bullet’s engine turned off, she sat for a moment and listened. Nothing but the warbling of a grey jay sitting on top of the pump. There were no instructions, no card reader, no fuel in the line. She got out of the car and looked around. The inside of the store was dark, and the two trailers at the edge of the clearing had a couple of salt-scabbed cars parked outside of them, but no lights were on. There was a dingy greenhouse lined with milky plastic sheeting that blew in the wind just enough to show that there were no signs of life in there except for a few flats of starts.
She sighed heavily and glanced at the gas gauge. Quarter tank. It would have been easier to just drive away, to not put on the mask she used for strangers. After all, there were ten gallons of gas in the trunk, an emergency supply that she wouldn’t need once she hit Barilof. But if she got lost, or missed the turn, or the gauge turned out to be faulty… those ten gallons wouldn’t get her very far.
Fanning the sweat from her lower back with her shirt, she walked over to the front door of the market and cupped her free hand against the glass. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a little old man, fast asleep behind the counter, his back propped against the wall of the shop and his hands hanging lifelessly by his sides. For a second she thought he was dead, something about the lifeless tilt of his body in the chair made her jerk back from the door - but that shifted its weight and made the bell hanging from the inside lintel clatter enough to bring the little man back to life. He smoothed his beard with one hand and looked around. Seeing Erin on the other side of the door, he hopped down from the stool and ambled over to the front door.
“What can I getcha for, little lady?” he asked as he swept the door open and stood aside. “A little gas or diesel?”
“I’ll take forty of regular, if you’ve got it,” replied Erin, trying not to stare at the contrast between his jagged yellow teeth and the silky white of his beard.
“Ohhh I think we can work something out. Let’s have a look,” he said, and, whistling under his breath, went behind the counter and started rummaging around. While he searched, Erin browsed the shelves. They were stacked with a jumble of supplies - hammers interspersed with boxes of cake mix, antique crosscut saws, pipe ends, three large burlap sacs, labeled “CANDY, MINT FLAVOR,” “MARSHAMALLOW,” and “LICORICE, BLACK,” bags of elbow macaroni with just “10LBS” written on them in permanent marker, a stack of unmarked boxes that she discovered contained army surplus ammunition, a rusty can of bear spray, a whole shelf of paper plates and plastic cutlery, one wall of canned beans, and two inflatable kayaks that hung flaccidly from the rafters.
“Aha,” the clerk mumbled to himself as he opened a dusty ledger to one of the last pages and ran his finger down a column of figures scratched out in spidery ballpoint script. He tapped the last number in the column.“Looks like I’ve got just about enough. Good thing the truck’s coming in the morning or we’d have ourselves a little pickle. You need anything else, darlin? Some beans?”
Erin was about to shake her head no, when she saw a tray of small purple flowers through the window. “What are those?” She asked. “Are those violets?”
He looked out the window and nodded. “Sure are, I bred ‘em myself. Burl’s blue babies, I call ‘em.”
“Does that make you Burl?” Erin asked with a smile. Then she frowned. She didn’t actually care.
“Sure does, I been breeding them - and other like ‘em for nearly thirty years. If you’se interested I got lots more interesting ones out back.” He looked at her with raised eyebrows and smoothed his mustache with the fingers of one hand. “In the greenhouse.”
“That…” Erin started, not sure what her excuse was going to be. “That’s not today,” she finished lamely.
“Suit yourself,” shrugged Burl, the smile gone from his face.
“I’ll take one of the violets outside, though.” Erin offered
Burl pulled on the bottom of his pointy white beard and shook his head. “What’s one lousy flower? That’s like no flower at all! Might as well take the whole flat. Twenty bucks, that’ll be ten of them for your nice little house.”
Margins on gas must have been not so good.
“That way, if one dies you’ll just have another. Can never have to many pansies.”
“I’m not…” She started, started to tell him that she didn’t have a home, didn’t have a garden, didn’t have any soil in which to sprout the flowers but then stopped in mid-sentence, remembering Julie’s stricken, fearful face. People die out there, man. Less than wise. “I’m not worried,” she finished. “I’ll just come back and get another one if I need it.”
Burl’s face crinkled. “You do that. Sure, do that. But don’t want too long, these go fast. There’s always someone coming back around, wishing they’d bought a couple when they still had the chance.”
Erin looked out at the barren gravel driveway. “Really?”
Burl laughed. “No, I usually just end up taking them out back when they outgrow their containers. But it’s been a lot of violets over the years and not much ground left.”
Erin nodded and cleared her throat.
“Oh, right! You’ll be wanting that gas now. Remind me again, that’s regular or diesel?
“Regular. I do have a question for you. I’m trying to get to Barilof tonight, but my map isn’t very good. Is it easy to miss the turn?”
“Easy? For you? Or for who?” asked Burl, and continued without waiting for an answer. “There’s always a chance out here you’ll miss anything you’re looking for. But you can see it pretty good, if you’re not looking too hard. It’s a ways down the road, on the left.”
“That close? I thought it was still another hundred and fifty miles.”
“Well, what’s a few hundred miles? This close to the end, everything stacks up real nice. ”
Erin smiled politely and tapped her card on the counter.
Burl glanced down at the noise. Then he scowled.
“We don’t take those.” He tapped the sign on the register. “See? We don’t take those. Nothin’ plastic. The networks don’t work worth a damn out here. Good thing, too. Who needs the paper trail?” He laughed loudly at his own joke a few times, heaving his whole body from the shoulders, until he started coughing. When he was done, he looked expectantly at Erin who obliged by fishing out a ratty twenty dollar bill and putting it on the counter.
“I’ll just take twenty then, and I’ll leave the violet.”
Burl scratched at the edge of his beard and spat something into the paper cup sitting next to the register. He glanced outside and, with a shrug, turned back to Erin.
“That’s fine, but you go on and take the flower. No sense in letting it go to waste there on the shelf.” He opened one of the green taps on the wall behind him, and the in-service light came on over the pump outside. “You’re all set now, eh.”
As the car filled, Erin browsed through the tray of flowers, looking for the one with the nicest leaves and the most blossoms. As she was about to get into the car, she looked back into the store and locked eyes with Burl, who was standing just inside the door, staring at her through the glass. He was holding a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other, but both of his hands hung loosely by his side. Erin stared directly at him, but he didn’t move. He just stood there, his whole weight against the door. Even as she peeled out of the parking lot, gravel spraying the side of the pump, she could see him in the rearview mirror, standing outside the store now, watching her merge back onto the highway.
Julie’s warnings about disappearances along the road ran through her head, as did the headline she’d seen at a cafe just on the other side of the Canadian border. A vanlife couple - he was a lapsed stockbroker, she was a publicist - had gone missing. Their bodies had been found a few days later in a ditch, hacked to pieces so badly that the beat cops had needed dental records to make the ID. She shuddered in the warm wind and leaned over to turn on the music, but then remembered that both the deck and her phone were dead. Silence it was, then.
At least there was finally something to look at. Most of the roads out here were built for war, not for sight seeing - so she had to settle for watching the constant wall of green tamarack, pine, birch, that had been closed in on the road for days. Occasionally there would be a boggy place in the flatlands where she would be able to see the mountains rising in each direction like fruiting bodies from the foliate landscape, but then the forest would close up around the road and she would be alone again. Occasionally, there were little towns, not marked on the map that consisted for a few trailers, a diner, a place to get gas. Sometimes she could see the mountains from the parking lot - but in between them, there was nothing but the blue ribbon of sky, the perfumed grass of the highway shoulder, and the walls in leaf.
But on this last stretch to Barilof, with the turn still in the mysterious distance there was a grade big enough to open the whole valley. On either side, the mountains caught the afternoon light, the snow at the peaks shining like gold. Even in summer snow would still fall there, and the driving wind of sundown gathered handfuls of powder and spread it into thin, lenticular clouds that trailed like ghosts from each peak. The snows melted in a constant cycle, always feeding the massive river that filled the lowlands to the right of the road.
At first, she didn’t register it as a river. It just looked like a place where the veil of trees was scraped down to the powdery white flesh underneath - but then she recognized it for what it was - a braided torrent of whitewater, so silty it ran like liquid clay.
As it sank below the trees once more, she realized it was the first real river she’d ever seen. All the other ones she had known were held by cement and limestone banks, lined with riverfront cafes, they were bodies of water who washed the sin of the cities to the ocean. Even upstream of the towns, there wasn’t such a thing as an untouched river. The dams held them, the water levels decided by committee, the course of the water set in stone. Here, the water surged, flooded, ate the landscape in one place, built it up in another. On either side of the waters there were the fragments of isolated oxbows, river remnants laid down in spring and blocked in fall. No man’s will was strong enough to impose continental order here - it was a flow whose back would not be broken, now that the high tide of civilization was in retreat.
She looked down at the map fluttering on the bench seat next to her, trying pick the valley and the river out from among it’s topological grid, but couldn’t look for long enough before the car veered wildly from side to side. Where was the notch in the mountains? It had to be there, the map showed it, and there was no way that the rocks had changed as much as the towns. She looked out again, leaning over the steering wheel, squinting into growing dusk. It was an hour before sunset, and the mountains to the North had finally cast the road into shadow, the whole valley, but ahead there was a place where the mountains dipped towards the road. It had to be the pass.
The gas gauge, she noticed, was hovering around half a tank. At her burn rate, that was nearly 200 miles. Close, but what else was there to do? If the point was to be convenient and comfortable, she would have just gone and lounged on the beach - not set about the task of falling off the edge of the inhabited earth. We’ll make it, she thought and touched the little flower that she’d re-homed into the cupholder by the dashboard.
As the road flattened out, she took her foot off the gas and leaned over to grab the map which had fallen to the floor of the passenger side, shaking off the cloud of peat moss and soft cedar bark that clung to it. Still no clear signs of the turn, the valley, or the river - but suddenly the trees gave way to delicate muskeg fen and, with the sun below the line of the mountains, she saw it clearly for the first time. Ahead, on the left, there was a clear gap in the mountains through which the setting sun spilled out.
Her relief at being able to see the turn, and that it was only a few dozen miles away was interrupted by the sudden realization that there was a crazy noise coming from the engine. It had always been a little knocky, but this was something new and awful that had made its way into the heart of the engine’s rhythm. Before she had a chance to figure out what was going on, the situation took care of itself. The knocking became insistent, manic, catastrophic. The steering column and dashboard began to vibrate violently, until the racket crescendoed into one last frantic burp and then retreated into absolute silence.
Emptied of the engine’s white noise, the vacuum of the car filled with a wave of sound from the forest - birds trilling in the tamarack, huge insects floating their heavy bodies between the towering blades, cricket song so big that it felt like she was a bug herself. The wind slowly died, the whir of rubber against the asphalt grew faint, and then she was alone on the raucous side of the road, with nothing but the trees, and the snow-capped midsummer mountains in a quiet ring on the horizon.
“Fuck,” Erin said softly under her breath, and dropped her forehead to the steering wheel.
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