Free Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent

there once, it will be there again. Have a little faith .
    But the oil drum perched on the spur of rock is empty, turned over on its side, rocking when he nudges it with a toe, its trash blown over the rim, he supposes, scattered across the floor of the arroyo, rags fluttering from prickly pear, shards variously glinting. She left the rug here, she said. That must have been aroundsunset. It’s unlikely that anyone has driven the road since then. The wind has been hard at work, lashing and moaning: Could the rug have been lifted and sailed over the rim? Here is the trail, wide enough to suit deer or two small boys but tricky for a grown man, stones kicked loose by his missteps, preceding him in clattering showers, his descent entirely audible, if there was anyone to hear. The interior of that listing refrigerator is pierced by spokes of moonlight: bullet holes. Paperbacks cartwheel past, shedding pages. When he picks his way among the wreckage, he meets another moon, hanging in the unsmashed headlight of a wrecked truck, the starry refraction of light coming from some earthly source. David makes for that glow eking out from under the tilted wing of an airplane. The throb in his jaw is worse, the pain in his back nagging, but apart from that, he feels good, looser, a little winded but freer, defiant, trying to recall the last time he pursued something, some aim or intention, under the night sky. Twenty years ago. With the other four, his brothers, prowling a mesa in the dark, tossing survey stakes over the rim after pouring sugar in a backhoe’s gas tank. Nothing he does now can compare with the satisfaction of that sabotage, with its clean, unequivocal high. He’s grown old, tame as office air. Jade had revived him, for a time. Ow. When a chip of stone grazes his chest, its sting—and the primal weirdness of being struck by a flying object in the dark—brings David entirely awake, but when he squints around, there’s only the gusting sand, cholla rearing up spookily to his left, his shadow dipping and lengthening as he hikes toward the glow—a campfire, maybe. Something pelts his chest again, then his arm, and before he can shield his eyes he’s assailed by a whirlwind of grit and twigs. Bewildered, he walks right into it, grazed, poked, showered with debris, leaves, twigs, and flying sand. If she were with him, Jade wouldhide her face against his chest, and he’d shelter her as best he could, her ferocious lawyer-hair lashing his face, and even with the wind whipping and scouring they could protect each other. David reels along blindly, and from the way his lungs strain he understands he must be shouting, though he can’t hear himself over the wind. This is what he has seen happen to small bald-headed children: death blows you away while you struggle, the truth, the outrage, dying in your throat. Flinging a last handful of grit, the blast relents. David has passed among the cholla unscathed, and here is the shelter under the airplane’s wing, from which a lantern is suspended, shining down on a boy and a girl, entwined on his rug, its arabesques dimmed, its choir of blues bleached to lunar grays and faint violet. The boy is fast asleep, but not the girl. The girl is awake. She tightens her arms around her boyfriend, and lifts her chin defiantly. She’s got the inky hair favored by punked-out runaways, a fright wig trailing sharp fangs over her forehead, the pinched-together brows and eyeholes whose expression can’t be deciphered. When he takes another step toward his rug, she flashes a palm. Stop. He takes another step, and gets both palms. She wants nothing more than to stop him, and he stops. It all stops, moon, love, breath, heartbeat. David sprawls there, feeling the hardness of the ground, the nerve-revival of panic, the terror that she won’t know what to do, that she’s stoned and can’t help. The wind dies down and the moonlight blinks and he doesn’t