Cinnamon, Cayenne and Fire Read online

  Crossing Airline Drive, and entering that blackened stretch of 641 toward Lake Maurepas, knocked Beau out of his reminiscing like a speed bump. As the brush thinned on the shoulders, and one could see deeper in the swamp where the surviving cypress wore scars of burnt bark, neither spoke. There was nothing to be said that had not been and small talk was just distraction for distraction’s sake. Signs of the old fire drove Beau ten years back down into memory almost as fast as it had brought him up.

  Grandpa Leon had not meant him to be on that burn. Beau’s mother was working another double shift and he should have been stretched out asleep in his X-Men pajamas when the old man closed the screen door softly and headed for the truck.

  Grandma Frances had passed two months before in a spring devoid of rain. For all that dry, baking summer, Leon’s Zippo was a metronome in his pocket. His muttering shifted aimlessly between Cajun and Spanish. Once, Beau watched the liquor store regulars swap looks as Leon, bourbon-filled coffee mug in swaying hand, let his story of Florida fountains wander passed the hallmark jokes and into salamanders and swamp fires.

  Beau kept watching for the pirogue to slide out from under the magnolia and into the truck, but it had not come.

  Near dusk, the snapping Zippo had risen to an agitated tempo Beau could hear even from his bed. When it suddenly halted, he went to the window and, seeing Grandpa head for the truck, climbed down the trellis. He managed to slip over the tailgate while the truck stalled at the end of the driveway, waiting for a pocket between the grain trucks headed for the Cargill elevator.

  Lying flat against the cab of the truck, Beau could not hear the Zippo lid, but figured it was going strong again. He was surprised, then, when the truck pulled over only just out of town, and almost hoofed it back to his bedroom. The way Leon headed into the swamp at a march made up Beau’s mind and he snuck in the trail of his grandpa’s lengthening shadow.

  By dusk, Beau was crouched behind a palm fan, watching his grandpa pace around a dry pool. The old man looked like a hound after nutria, digging into the peat, moving to another spot, and digging more. The more he dug the more dust he crumbled and sucked into his nostrils. Aggravated, he set fires around the edges of the pool, stood smelling the smoke and then marched deeper into the swamp.

  After a half-mile of little fires, Leon must have found a thistle, though the light was too dim for Beau to spot it. After it had wilted in the flames, the old man settled down to watch. Beau settled down too, which would have been worse if he had not fallen asleep in Leon’s tracks.

  Beau woke as Leon scooped him up in his arms. The night was windless and the smoke hung in thick curtains around them.

  “What the hell you doing out here, boy?”

  “I wanted to come with you,” Beau coughed, not able to say he had been scared all day by that incessant snapping.

  “All right, let’s get you home then,” his grandpa answered, clutching him close to his chest as he traced his way back to the truck.

  Even without the wind to drive it, the fire crawled through the swamp in wide, flickering arcs. Beau hid his face in his grandpa’s neck, leaving one eye to watch the frightening shapes the flames cast as they danced with deep shadows in the smoke.

  The swamp this summer was more than just dry. It was a bone yard of dead brush, piled on ancient graves of brittle branch and cypress needles packed into peat. When Grandpa Leon reached that first empty pool, his fires smoldering in a low ring around it, he did not think of the tinder below the surface. He crossed the pool and was stepping over the glowing cinders at its edge when he reached the pit.

  The fire was burning down into the peat, diving like a kingfisher after a bluegill. Buried in its fuel with nowhere to escape, the fire’s intensity had doubled, then tripled, into a white-hot heat.

  Leon sank down to his knees into a smelting furnace. The scream in Beau’s ear deafened him and brought a ringing like a million cicada startled into singing. By then Beau was screaming as well.

  The oxygen found the pocket of sequestered heat and ignited. Flame ripped up in an explosion of spark and ash. Leon, still screaming as his skin liquefied, waded two steps more before he found solid earth. They collapsed on the ground, the old man beating the flame out of Beau’s pajamas before rolling the fire off his own melting skin.

  When he was older, Beau saw their scars as two parts of one horrific canvas. His skin was crackling up the back of his thighs and thinned to light scarring on his spine. Two stripes interrupted the scar, Grandpa’s forearms across the small of his back and under his ass. Leon bore a pale sketch of healthy skin, a boy pressed to his chest, legs wrapped around his hips, all outlined by hot pink scar. It was a portrait only fully appreciated if they held each again in the same pose, but it was some time before they had the chance.

  Aside from the weeks in the burn unit, for both of them, there had been court and the two summers Grandpa passed in Angola prison. The fire had eaten the old man’s pants up to the belt and burned open the bottoms of his pockets. When the firefighters found a Zippo in the ash, P.D.L. etched in the base, each knew the owner.

  The peat fire burned deep through July and August. When the smoke mixed with the morning fog off the Mississippi it was so thick the State Troopers had to walk drivers across the Gramercy Bridge. Even so, there were 17 accidents, and one trooper crushed between cars in the smoke fog.

  The National Guard borrowed helibuckets from Virginia. Their Blackhawk helicopters circled like huge dragonflies, dipping the giant yellow sacks into the Mississippi and dropping the water onto the hot spots. The burn did not really stop smoldering though until the rains started up again in September.