smoke, the last wheeze of a dying catastrophe. Jack wrapped a leg around the thinning trunk with the instinct of a rider on a bucking pony. He shielded his face with his forearms and shoved his head through a fragrant spray of needles and looked to the northwest. The happy curse that was halfway up his throat caught like a bone.
“What?” Wynn said, expecting a shout. “What?”
Silence.
“You okay?”
“Not really.”
“What’s wrong? You get sap in your eye?” But he knew what was wrong, he knew Jack well enough. “It’s bad, huh?” he said.
“I don’t know if bad is the word, Big. Give me a minute.”
Jack said that sometimes. Gimme a minute. It was when he was about to take the stern paddle through a heavy rapid. He said it when he was overcome with emotion, and he’d said it in a brew pub in Lake Placid a few weeks ago when a very large summer person in a Ralph Lauren shirt had returned to the bar to find Jack talking to his wife. Jack hadn’t known it was the man’s wife, but he had unerring antennae for a-holes and they were vibrating strongly. The girl wasn’t wearing any kind of a ring and she’d seemed quite eager to talk. But the man didn’t have much of a sense of humor and Jack’s antennae hummed. Jack stood, willing to move off and let it go, but the man had tapped his shoulder and said, “Hey, dude, you think you can just worm in when a guy goes to the pisser and worm off when he comes back?” Jack set his Red Canoe Lager down on the table and told the man to give him a minute. The man looked confused, because it was not rhetorical—Jack was actually trying to decide what to do; and then he made his decision and decked him. (Later in the car Wynn had said, laughing, “So much depends upon/a red/canoe/beaded with beer/sweat/beside the white/dickhead.”) So now when Jack said Gimme a minute Wynn felt his guts tighten.
Jack called down finally, “You ever feel like you’re in a weird dream?”
“Like when we’re hanging out?”
“You know, if you were up here you might not be cracking jokes.”
“Bad?”
“Well.” Jack hacked and spat down to the other side of the tree from Wynn, adjusted his footrest in the crotch of a limb. “The plume is rolling due south. Maybe a little east. Why—”
“Why we haven’t smelled it.”
“Yeah, and it’s not really a plume, Big. I’d say you should climb up here but no point in two of us having nightmares.”
“I guess.”
“It’s frigging clouds. Looks like a thunderhead. And it’s a lot closer. Maybe a quarter, a third the distance of what we saw the other night. I can see the frigging flames. Like the leading edge under the smoke.”
“How far do you think?”
Silence.
“Jack, how far?”
“I dunno. Maybe twenty miles.”
Silence. Wynn said, “The other night we thought it was twenty-five or thirty. So it’s come maybe five or ten miles in two days.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“It’s getting colder.”
“Hold on.”
He shinnied down, lowered himself limb to limb, and at the bottom branch he swung out away from the roots and dropped the last five feet to a bed of needles. “What’d you say?”
“I said it’s getting colder. Maybe it’ll slow.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Jack dusted bits of bark off the front of his shirt. He didn’t sound convinced. He looked up at his friend. “I’ve seen a few wildfires, Wynn.”
Wynn winced. Jack almost never called him by his given name. It meant shit was serious, like when his mother said, “Wynn Peter Brelsford…” That was bad. He said, “You’ve seen a lot of fires and…”
“Right. Biggest fucker I’ve seen by far. Looks like a hay barn going up times a million.”
“In eight or ten days the river will be wide. A hundred yards anyway. Maybe.”
Jack raised an eyebrow and snagged the Skoal out of his shirt pocket and pried off the lid and offered it to Wynn, who shook his head. “That thing,” Jack said. He took a large dip, tamped it into his lower lip. “Won’t even notice. It’ll jump the river like a semi running over a chipmunk.”
“Yeah, but if we’re in the middle of the river…”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe. The air gets superheated. That’s what makes a firestorm. The rolling smoke is actually gas, and if the wind is right and it ignites, it’ll flash-bake you a quarter mile away.”
“It’s getting colder, though, right?”
Jack huffed a breath. “But we don’t want