“Good idea! Do that,” the Fireman called out. “No, wait—shit, come back here. You’re going to want your clipboard so you can call in the correct plate.”
Harper peered out through the cabinet door, still open a crack, and watched the redheaded boy jog back toward the front of the truck. In a moment he had trotted out of sight.
Harper eased the door shut.
She handed Mr. Truffles to Renée and rearranged the fire extinguishers to hide them . . . an unnecessary task, as no one ever opened the back compartments, and in another moment they were moving. Harper laid herself flat. A muscle twitched nervously in her left leg.
Mr. Truffles purred softly. Renée ran her fingers through the fur on the crown of his head.
“You want to know something, Harper?” Renée asked softly.
“What?” Harper asked.
“I don’t think this is my cat,” Renée told her.
12
The fire truck hitched, seemed to roll back a foot or two, then lurched forward, almost reluctantly. The metal grooves in the asphalt began to sing under the tires again. Harper distantly heard the ding-ding of the brass bell, the Fireman ringing it adios.
The truck picked up speed, running north.
“We made it,” Renée said. She sat up on her elbow. “I think we’re safe.”
Harper didn’t reply. She lifted her head slightly and banged it back down against the steel floor, thinking of the camera.
“What?” Renée asked.
Harper shook her head.
The truck went on for a while. Harper thought John had it all the way up to sixty or seventy, had a feeling of smooth, fast riding. She thought with enough time, the rock and sway of the truck and that sensation of rushing along might put her to sleep.
After ten minutes, though, he downshifted. The truck rolled softly to a stop, gravel crunching under the tires and stones pinging the undercarriage.
Harper was on her knees by the time the Fireman opened the back cabinet door.
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she said.
“No.” He had a bad habit—when he was lying, he always looked you right in the eye. “I thought I’d see if you wanted to sit up front with me.”
The other compartment opened and Allie put her head out, rubbing a hand over the honey-colored bristle growing back on her skull. “Take Nick too. His feet stink.”
“All right, then,” he said.
“I don’t think you should’ve pulled over here,” Harper said. “We’re too close to the border.”
“I have to feed the pail,” he said.
All of them climbed down and out to stretch. Harper pushed her knuckles into the small of her back, and popped the joints of her spine. A breeze, silted with fine grit, blew her hair back from her brow.
They were north of Cape Neddick, in what had once been a nature preserve. On the Cape Neddick side of the road, it still was. Heavy oaks, splendid with new green leaves, waved their branches. Bees thrummed in the tawny grass.
On the other side of the road was a moonscape of charred sticks and blackened rock, standing in drifts of ash. The blasted remains of the trees looked like shadows sketched against a background of pale grime. A building of corrugated tin stood a hundred feet off the road, the sides buckled from exposure to heat, so deformed it resembled a five-year-old’s drawing of a house. Those acres of desolation went on and on for as far as Harper could see.
“Is it all like this?” Renée asked, shading her eyes with one hand
“The state of Maine? Based on what I’ve heard, no. Farther north it should be much worse.” He looked back the way they had come. “I don’t have any idea what the roads ahead might be like. The fire crew we’re pretending to be part of was only going up 95 as far as York, then were branching off to take a state highway directly north. We’re a bit beyond York now, out in the great unknown.”
Harper followed him off the road, into the weeds. He foraged around, collecting old, dry tree branches. Nick stood at the tree line, his back to them, taking a leak into the ferns.
“It won’t take them long to figure out they shouldn’t have let us through,” Harper said.
“It won’t matter. When they realize their mistake, I imagine they’ll just keep their mouths shut. After all, it’s much easier to make an example out of them than us. The higher ups don’t have to catch them. No, I think we’ll be—”
“I don’t think you really understand. Something happened on the bridge. There was a fuckup. The cat jumped out. I was scared someone would see him and they’d decide to do a thorough search of the truck. So I got out to grab him and there was a camera in the booth. They have video that proves you were carrying stowaways.”
“If they even watch it,” he said. Then he looked back at her and said, “I told you that cat was a mistake!”
“Is there anything in all the world you like better than saying ‘I told you so’?” Those words had been favorites of Jakob. She didn’t like the idea that John resembled Jakob in any way at all. Just the thought made her want to punch him, hard.
The Fireman turned with his armload of exhausted-looking wood and wrestled his way back through the weeds.
“They won’t send anyone after us,” he said, finally. “New Hampshire is sealed off—a police state. They can’t send anyone after us. They can’t risk it. Anyone they send might decide not to come back. This is the problem with police states. The prison guards are prisoners, too, and most of them know it.”
But he looked her in the eye the whole time he was lecturing her, which is how she knew he didn’t believe it himself.
He climbed on the running board and began to push sticks into the smoking pail. He was still feeding the flames when Nick wandered back from the pines.
“Why is there a bucket full of coals on the truck?” Nick asked with his hands.
She needed to do some finger-spelling to explain. “It’s a souvenir of his favorite fire.”
“He’s as crazy as a shithouse rat,” Nick said. “Sometimes I forget.”
“Watch your language or I’ll wash your filthy hands with soap, young man.”
“Ha ha,” he told her. “I get it. Very funny. Everyone loves a good deaf joke. Hey, why did God make farts stink? So deaf people could enjoy them, too.”
When they pulled back onto I-95, the Fireman leaned out the window and rang his bell again into the emptiness.
13
The farther north they went, the less it seemed they were driving on the Earth. Dunes of gray ash had drifted across the road, sometimes so high and so wide—islands of pale fluffy grime—it seemed wisest to slow down and steer around them. The landscape was the color of concrete. Carbonized trees stood on either side of the road, shining with a mineral gleam under a sky that was steadily turning pale and pink. Nothing grew. Harper had heard that weeds and grass recovered swiftly after a wildfire, but the soil was buried under the caked ash, a whitish clay that permitted no trace of green upon it.
The breeze gusted, grit fluttered across the windshield, and the Fireman turned on the wipers, which smeared long streaks of gray across the glass.
They had been on the road for perhaps twenty minutes when Harper saw houses, a line of mobile homes, on a ridge to the east of the car. There was nothing left of them. They were black shells, windows smashed out, roofs collapsed in. They flickered past, a line of warped aluminum shoe boxes, open to the sky.
By then they were only doing twenty miles an hour, the Fireman weaving in and around mounds of ash and the occasional tree across the road. They passed above a stream. The water was a trough of gray sludge. Debris was tugged reluctantly along in the filthy drink: Harper saw a tire, a twisted bicycle, and what looked like a bloated pig in denim overalls, its ripe, spoiled flesh swarming with flies. Then Harper saw it wasn’t a pig and reached over to cover Nick’s eyes.