Foreign Fire
Foreign Fire
It was his mother, not his father, who set him down to tell him that Papa had died. Something-cancer is what she said. He could never remember the first word except that it ended with static and had something to do with Papa's smoking habit. When she told him, all he could think of at first was static on the TV, a gray and white fog creeping out of the screen and enveloping his grandfather. Once the gray fog dissipated, there was a scene of an empty yellowed recliner sitting in Papa’s living room. It was much sooner than anyone thought, Mom said. It was only last December that he went in to get checked out. The buds had barely begun to form on the new April trees and he was already gone.
It probably should have been his father that broke the news. After all, it was his father. They looked just the same, his father and Papa. Broad shoulders and long torsos, wide backs that browned to mud when they worked in the yard in the sun. Their hands were big, almost too big for their arms. When he closed his eyes he could feel his Papa’s hands enveloping his shoulders, fingers resting on his collarbone while the thumbs met on his thin spine. He went to church once when he was a little older and realized that if God had hands they would feel just like Papa’s.
His mother didn’t cry when she told him. She was placid and serious. She offered a hug and then went back to work in the kitchen. A little later she came out and asked if he wanted to talk about it and he said no. His father wasn’t home that day.
His father worked in the nearby park. He was often gone days at a time. He rescued things there. Mostly dogs and people. Sometimes a mule that had fallen. One time it was a bear. Levi was too young to remember the details, but he often pictured his father’s big hands gripping a great hairy mass draped over his shoulder. His park had more visitors than most other National Parks combined, his father said. People loved it because it had the biggest canyon in the world, besides this other one in Asia. He had seen the canyon several times. Its size was nauseating. Standing on the edge, he often felt like he was suddenly stuck in a tide in the ocean, pulling him toward the empty air. He’d only been to the ocean once, but remembered the hidden draw beneath the waves tearing him out of his father’s overgrown hands. This is what would replay in his head each time he looked down into the red and orange.
Not only was his father not home when she told him of Papa’s death, but he didn’t see him for days. Mom would get a phone call each day around 6 o’clock, and he could tell that each time his father was postponing his return.
“Another day? Seriously, Aaron?”, she would whisper to him. She always whispered to him on the phone.
“Is Dad sad that Papa is gone?”, he would ask each time his mother hung up the phone. Of course he is, his Mother would say. He’ll be home soon. Just another day.
Another day became seven. It was a full week after his mother broke the news that his father returned. As always, he came through the front door in the middle of the night and went to sleep without showering. He was in the kitchen that next morning, and asked Levi how school
was going, as if the earth had not been ripped from its axis. A magpie’s scratchy call came in through the kitchen window. Levi sat down at the table.
“Fine”. He had spent the week cooped up in his room, missing 3 school days because of a fever. He’d spent his time running through each and every memory he had of Papa.
The summer before, when he was 5, was spent with Nana and Papa. They drove to his house on the outskirts of Flagstaff, picked him up, and then, just the 3 of them, drove for 2 full days back to their house in Texas. He remembered the faded greens and reds of his home state giving way to the flat browns along the empty highway, then to miles of yellowed grass, and finally to deep emerald once they reached his grandparent’s side of town. Somewhere in the flat browns they stopped at a long, featureless building with giant red rocks reaching to the sky behind it. There was a concrete teepee, twice the height of the building, that they all took a picture in front of. It was painted white with blue triangles in a ring around the top. Inside the building, among the key chains and toy drums and strange woven spheres, Levi found a small piece of carved wood. One end was a long slender piece that was carved through the middle, like a pipe. The opposite end was carved like a wooden bowl, its bottom hollowed out to meet the other end of the cavity. You could blow in one end and feel the wind shoot up through the bowl. It had geometric shapes carved out along the side and concentric circles around the bowl part. The dark man at the front of the store told him it was called a peace pipe, and Papa, a wide smile across his face, bought it for him. He could tell Nana was not happy about it, but assumed Papa’s smile was too big and nice for her to say anything. He blew on it like a flute all through the New Mexican desert until the little bowl on the end fell off. At the next stop, Papa glued it back on with a bottle of glue from his dashboard.
——
It wasn’t until he overheard his father on the phone with Nana that he realized they had missed the funeral. His father’s voice was relaxed and calm like it always was, but he could see his giant white knuckles squeezing the dining room chair as he talked.
“Miriam, it was terrible timing. Maybe we can make it down this summer. No, I don’t think so. What do you mean, he has great memories of him. And of you, too. This summer. Of course.” Even though Levi had always noticed that his father called Nana by her first name, the oddness of it just hit him. Levi suddenly wondered what his father called Papa. Why had he never thought of that?
Levi had never been to a funeral. He had heard other kids his age talk about them. People in black, people singing church music, family members saying nice things about the dead person. What stuck with him the most was the story that a short, freckled kid in his math class said about the casket. People would stand in a line and slowly walk by this casket to look at the person who died inside of it. Sometimes it took hours. Levi remembered the lines that he had seen at his father’s park. He told him people were waiting to look at the canyon from a certain lookout. For some reason the canyon looked different from that spot. Maybe it was like that. He also
remembered the lines that formed at the single water spigot along the Eastern trail that led to the river at the bottom of the canyon. He pictured red, exhausted tourists lining up in the sun to see the casket that Papa lay in. Since he couldn’t picture Papa laying in the casket, and didn’t want to, the front of the line just led to a casket with a water spigot in it. The casket was nothing but a big jug of water.
His father had the whole week off once he came home. His work had made him. His father planned to spend the week in the backyard digging and planting the expansion of the garden bed that Mom wanted. It was too late in the season, his father complained, even as he pulled his tools out of the shed and started digging. Levi watched his father in the backyard, his shirt off, his wide back pulsing with each thrust of the shovel, sweat and dirt making mud on his enormous hands. He worked slowly and menacingly. The holes he dug were deep, and when his father would go inside for a drink, Levi would walk up to their edges and feel the coolness come out of the earth. Each time he did he felt the tide tugging at his ankles. The holes were big enough for him to fit into, he thought. It was then that he remembered what the freckled kid told him about the graveyard. When his father came back he couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Dad, what’s a funeral for?” His father’s eyes were usually summer lawn green, but with the sun behind him, they turned a deep, cool brown. Those deep eyes stared at Levi for half a minute, looking as desperate as a maimed mule in the canyon. His father became angry and then defiant and then, finally and comfortably, numb. He took a gulp of water and swallowed.
“For someone who’s passed”. He was looking at something over his son’s shoulder and then picked up the shovel.
Levi knew his father wasn’t answering, even if he wasn’t sure what he was asking. “No, but why for someone who died?”
“It’s just a tradition, I guess. Some people see it like they're saying goodbye to the person who passed.” A hoarse call from a magpie interrupted the following silence.
“Did you get to say goodbye to Papa?”
“You don’t have to go to a funeral to say goodbye, Levi.” They can’t hear you anyway, was on the tip of his tongue, but he knew better than to say it.
Yet, the last sentence had such little conviction that a dog could have smelt the cynicism. It confused Levi, and made him feel hot. His father went inside. The holes remained in the backyard the rest of the week, gaping and cool, while the shovel lay where his father tossed it like a snake sleeping in the grass. Levi avoided them both.
That summer in Dallas would never be repeated. Nana and Papa still lived in the house their son had grown up in on a cul-de-sac on the east side of the city. The city was evidently a sprawling metropolis, but his experience was confined to the verdant backyard. In the humid summer heat, all sorts of things grew that Levi had never seen. He would run around the back yard, Papa at his heels, feeling like he was in a rainforest with misshapen bushes, fruit trees, and heaps of flowers erupting from every square inch of turf. Giant mesquite trees outlined the property, leaving the small patches of grass and dirt cool even on the hottest of days. Papa would cut open a watermelon and they would sit together in the shade and eat the whole thing together.
One day it was a red one, the next day a yellow one. Papa always promised a blue one the next day and then they would both laugh: Papa at the joke, Levi at the giant smile of his grandfather.
Nana had a pet rabbit that Papa called Ears. They were regular sized, at least for a rabbit, but Papa had such affection in his voice when he called the name out that it stuck. Ears would typically sit on the back porch with Nana, but when she was inside it would wander around the back yard with Papa and Levi, nibbling on scraps from the garden that Papa would dig up prematurely for him to enjoy. Ears, Papa explained, was not like other rabbits. His gray-brown coat was short, his tail a small plume of white. What I’m saying is that Nana didn’t get him from the store, he would say, poking at his little nose with a tuft of grass. Ears was not in any of those Easter books. He was a wild cottontail. He never went inside ("What would he do in there, Nana?", Papa would say, laughing) and would bathe in a dirt patch in the alleyway. On the last day of the summer, Nana found Ears in his patch of dirt, red and motionless. Damn stray dog, was all that Papa said when she told him. Levi never saw the body. There was no trace of Ears that afternoon in the dirt patch, or the garden, or by the biggest mesquite trunk. The next day his Mom and Dad showed up to take him back to Arizona. He spent the car ride wondering where Ears’ body went and what the dog did. Did Papa or the dog take the body somewhere? They didn’t stop at the blue and white teepee.
——
It was his mother’s idea that he and his father take a weekend to themselves. One day after school, they took the truck west and drove just outside of his father’s park to set up camp. They arrived with a single hour of daylight left. His father immediately began to set up the tent, the stove, seats, and other amenities that he never had in the backcountry, but that his wife always convinced him to bring because of Levi’s age. Standing and watching his father, Levi began to feel the tug of inquisition, like the tide in the ocean, slowly dragging a mystery up to the surface to be reckoned with. But something in Levi told him to resist the tide this time. He thought of the shovel in the grass, the yawning pits in the backyard, and started to walk away from camp. His father called that he would let him know when dinner was hot.
The land was mostly flat in the land around the canyon. But for the low trees and scrubs, one could see for miles. The densely packed flora made it a maze of random selection. Levi walked toward the sun, winding through open paths. The weeks of confusion, the verdant memories now turned gray, laid heavy on his shoulders. He was so caught up in his head that he almost missed it. To the right of his path lay a gray-brown lump, a white plume sticking out one end. As he approached the unmistakable shape of a cottontail rabbit lay motionless in the dirt. Levi knelt down to look. He poked it with a stick. Then he reached out and felt its nose, its soft paw, its ears. The tide was slowly throbbing, and he began to see his questions drifting lazily out to sea. But the tide also brought in something new. A swell; a scent; an untangling of the knot.
He carried the cottontail like a baby until a spot under a young juniper caught this eye, the branches just clearing his head. The sun was setting behind the tree, and he knew within
minutes the orange beams scattered by the branches would disappear. He set the cottontail next to the bush and gathered as many sticks as he could from the area, carefully snapping them into identical lengths and stuffing them in his coat pocket. As he worked he noticed the blood red berries of a currant bush. The small, verdant specks shown orange in the living light. He pulled off a handful, careful not to break open the skins of the berries. Back under the juniper tree, he pulled out the lighter he had slipped in his coat pocket in the truck and lit a fire from half the sticks, one of the few skills his father had passed on to him. The sky was now darkening, and now it was his little fire which threw orange rays on the ground around him. He set the rest of the sticks next to the fire, and the berries next to the rabbit. When he noticed that the four objects created a semicircle in the dirt, he pulled out a long carved stick with a wooden bowl on the end, its engravings worn smooth and its surface oily from handling. He had kept the peace pipe close since his father had come home. He looked at it every evening before bed. Now, he set it between the berries and the pile of sticks. Rabbit, currant, pipe, tinder, fire; he now had a totem of innocence laid out before him; a rune that pointed directly at Levi sitting in the dirt.
As the fire burned, Levi fed it from his pile of sticks, then occasionally a berry. He sat in the dark like a soldier tending the eternal flame. The smell of the juniper, the small sticks of cedar, the virgin currants, clung to Levi’s shirt. The smoke ascended through the juniper branches as the moon, that faithful witness, rose behind him. Warm, overgrown hands descended on Levi’s shoulders. He could feel the soft calluses on his skin, the smell of the garden, could hear the ruffle of a nose against soft roots, searching. As the hands tightened, he shuddered, and turned around to find his father was not behind him. Just the moon.
What he had overlooked in his search for a place for the rabbit was the dead branches and juniper leaves spread beneath his totem, which now began to crackle loudly as the fire spread across the ground. The dry spring worked its havoc quickly as the fire spread to the root of the tree, its waxy prickles lighting up one by one. Then a smile lit up his face as the fire moved across the fur of the rabbit, its gray-brown coat turning into rays of sun. This is where it goes, Levi thought. This is it. He reached down and took the peace pipe, and chancing a stray spark on his naked hand, placed the peace pipe down on the burning fur. He took a single step back and watched as the tree was enveloped in ceremony.
His father, Aaron, had paused as he searched the surrounding woods. He stood for a moment in last of the day’s light, watching a murder of magpies descend on a carcass of a mule deer. Such beautiful creatures, he thought, to be scavengers. It was then that the blaze caught his eye. Levi, he said out loud, and ran toward the foreign fire. He expected the scene that he was approaching to be chaos, but instead he felt as if he was walking into a myth. A prevarication of the gods. Levi stood rigid, sweating, covered in dirt and ash, his hands a blaze of red, before a great flaming juniper. At the foot of the tree Aaron saw clearly the rabbit and the oddly shaped stick, all so carefully set in place. Levi didn’t notice his father until the hard hands pulled him back and onto the ground. Surprised at the force, Levi cried out, and ran headlong towards the fire. His father enveloped his small frame and tucked him to his chest as he fell to his knees. Transfixed and bewildered, they set in the dirt until the juniper branches collapsed, threatening
the matchbox of brush around them. But the fire withheld the tide; the sparks never made the jump to the surrounding tinder as they had to Levi’s jacket and hair, now pressed against his father’s face.
They walked back slowly to camp without words. They ate their dinner cold and, still covered in ash and sweat, crawled into the tent. Levi began to cry a soft cry. Aaron rolled over and placed his hands across his son’s chest. The intent of the scene was burned into his mind. He felt his son’s shoulders soften, and they both fell asleep to the rough night calls of the black-billed magpie.
Chris Roberts has an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Tyler. He teaches English at North Mesquite High School.
