F*ckface Read online

  The first thing he noticed missing was the sofa. He came out of the bathroom and stood naked and soggy in the living room and felt a weird, unfamiliar breeze to his right. It took him a moment to look in that direction and realize she’d taken it. Larry wondered which of May’s friends owned a pickup, how she’d wrestled the loveseat’s puffy, awkward body out the narrow door. She was so small. A few days later the bed in the spare room was missing, and there were no plates or bowls to eat off of. May was emptying him out.

  He switched from day shifts and went out in the night. Not that it mattered; either way he was gone for days at a time. He saw less and less of May, who still did not ask about the fires. He slept while she was awake; he fought fire while she slept.

  Night work suited him. He could see the enemy and nothing else; he could focus. Larry fought for Hollow Rock every night through November. The teams were just barely staying ahead of the threats, which were legion, fierce, and scattered. First they prayed for rain. When rain didn’t come, they prayed for smoke, the death of wind, a cold fog to choke oxygen, douse sparks. Instead, the clear fall weather gave the blazes air, feeding every small hell. The forest went cinematic at night, with lit slithers of amber inching in chiaroscuro through the trees and blackness.

  Millions of orange cinders floated around Larry perpetually in the dark. Fire likes to jump, to send out emissaries. Each night, more ignited dander and duff—leaves, twigs, campsite detritus—swirled and arced over the ditches they dug and above the pocked, disused logging roads they used as markers, lines of defense. Embers burned bright and small, like sprites carrying the news of fire. Larry watched them with his mouth open. He wheezed inside his mask; his breaths echoed and pooled hotly on his upper lip. Even masked, he could taste the firebrands in the scorched air. They were lighted wicks uncandled, unbound tendrils eating themselves. They passed delicately in front of him, seeking hosts, filling his view as they yearned across every thwarting gap. When it was quiet, when no one was shouting, Larry heard the trees recoil. Branches crackled; trunks creaked and flinched from the bite of flame.

  Most of the embers burned themselves out, dissipating into charred vapor. Some he swatted or stomped. The ones he couldn’t reach, the few that caught a wind, continued on in the thick ether, above the forest, eventually coming to rest on fresh, dry victims in the distance.

  * * *

  In November a fire behaviorist came down from Virginia to direct a controlled burn near the Chimney Gap golf course. They wanted to save the condos and rental cabins, so Larry and the Oregon team filled driptorches and lit up stands of cedars on the back nine. The behaviorist said it would stop the skulking blazes from coming over the hills and taking out residential buildings. Starve the worst fronts, stall the rate of spread. It would spare the east side of town, the behaviorist told the club manager, who fretted over the grand, older oaks that lined the fairways.

  Kill a margin, said the behaviorist, for the greater good.

  Larry, the behaviorist, and a dozen Oregonians led by a burly woman named Link spent two days on the burn. When it was over, a prophylactic line of char was established across the perimeter of the country club. Link’s team roamed the cauterized stripe of land afterward. They checked for sparks, scarred their boots, stood dazed in the carnage. Some of the Oregonians fell asleep leaning against their trucks. Others roamed the blackline still holding driptorches, which puffed contained flame from thick metal tips. Occasionally someone would unleash a torch into a tangle of brush they’d missed. Twigs and bushes plumed in round, silent explosions.

  In the evening of the second day, the behaviorist stood beside Larry atop a steep hillside crawling with fire. The hilltop looked out over the state forest into distant, peaceful blue ridgelines. Below burned the worst of Helm County’s trouble. The sun set quickly, and snakes of flame downhill churned in an early twilight, moving upward toward their blackline.

  The behaviorist was bald, fifty, militaristic. His name was Don. Pale and thick in the shoulders, he could have been Larry’s kin. They looked down and watched the front approach. Punches of heat seeped toward them. Larry had taken off his turnout gear and tossed it in a nearby truck. He fumbled with his suspenders and T-shirt, wiped sweat from under his eyes. His eyelashes were singed and uneven. Black particulate sprinkled his brow and made gray streaks in his chin stubble.

  Look at it, Don the behaviorist said.

  A snow of ash hung around them in the sharp air.

  Get the hoses, Larry said.

  Link and two Oregonians dragged themselves up and set to work. Don sniffed and shook his head slowly.

  It’s not going to rain tomorrow, he said. They said it might, but it won’t. I don’t think it ever will.

  Larry squatted and stared down the writhing, glowing slope. Behind him, to the west, a breeze came across the fairway, cooling the blackline and tickling his back. It wafted past the trucks, past Link’s crew, over his body. It cooled his skin and pushed back the scent of smoke; then it blew through the fading sunlight and floated, thoughtlessly, carelessly, down the mountainside, down into the gloom and the rising heat.

  Blazing tendrils of ladder fire, a full-on front burning from root to kudzu to canopy, fed themselves on that wind. The flames suckled for it, raged like addicts. Remnants of twilight purpled the Oregonians’ skin as Larry watched the updrafts gorge themselves on air.

  Larry and Don stood on their blackened swath worrying into the abyss. The trees here were all networked into each other, a thick hash of enmeshed twig and vine. A low blanket of merciful smoke might have stifled what was coming. But the breeze came again, blithe and fresh, and the scene burned bright and hellish.

  This is what happens, said Don.

  Larry squatted, pulled a hunk of beef jerky out of his pocket. The meat was a wilted, hot lump of putty.

  Y’all should have done more land use planning, said Don. More management.

  They cut our budget, Larry said. They cut it every year.

  Same in Virginia. Same everywhere, said Don. Plus, perfect conditions. It’s a bad fall.

  I feel responsible, Larry said.

  You didn’t light the match, said Don.

  I didn’t mind the matchbook, either, Larry said.

  If this breeze keeps up, we’ll get a stack effect, said Don. That’s gonna be bad.

  Larry chawed his jerky and nodded once, slow.

  There’s too many cultivated species here, said Don, twisting toward the golf course. He pointed his clipboard at the ridge above town.

  Up there? he said. You got native trees. Just looking for a reason to burn.

  Look who you’re telling, Larry said.

  They both stared down the slope again, into the coming fire. Heat pushed against them and oiled their skin.

  Hell, said Don, we earned it. This whole damn business. We brought it out.

  They waited for Link to bring the hoses. She knew what to do.

  * * *

  His negotiations with May had looped and replayed all through the weeks of burning. If Larry was home, she asked the same questions. Called him a son of a bitch. Couldn’t make sense of it. Each time May spun faster, flipped her oak-colored hair, and parried with more logic. She was looking for reasons, for names. Larry didn’t know how to tell her there was no reason. He didn’t know how to tell her the world was just ending; that was all.

  She made Larry sit down the day she packed up her clothes. It was four in the afternoon, and he’d just woken up. May’s nose barely came to his chest. It was cold out, and she had taken most of what she wanted. She sat him on a footstool in the empty kitchen. She stood, brown eyes flickering, hips at a slant. The house had now fully absorbed the sweet smell of burnt forest that Larry kept bringing home with him. It was a heavy odor, thick as pine sap in the air between them.

  This is it, she said. I’ll be gone day after tomorrow. Her fingernails plucked at the “I’m With Her” sticker on her water bottle.

  I don’t know what to say, L
arry told her. I’m sorry.

  * * *

  Two days later, the Folk Center caught fire and had to be evacuated. May heard it on the radio and stilled. She waited for Larry to get home.

  Can I have the frog lamps, she said.

  Her voice was low, half tender. She was holding one of the lamps. Her little hand cupped the pewter lily pad at its base. Her other hand gripped its stem, a slim, iridescent column of crystal. The stem legs swooped up into a bulbous top—a brittle, delicate frog body leaping toward a fringed tapestry shade. The frog caught the overhead kitchen light, refracted it. Its stomach swirled a kaleidoscope of aquamarine hues onto May’s small knuckles.

  Larry was eating soup straight out of the can. He stood at the kitchen counter with his back to her.

  I’m asking, Larry. Your mom bought these for us at the Folk Center, she said. Remember?

  He leaned into the counter. The edge of the Formica cut sharply into his hip, and he closed his eyes. He rolled a salty potato on his tongue and wished he could go back to October, back to Qualla. Back to the wet spring.

  I want the pair, she said. They have to match. They’ll be worth something now.

  Larry had spent the last thirty-six hours with a handful of Link’s crew high above Hollow Rock, in a clearing he’d never seen before. They had been digging a broad, hopeless ditch. A platoon of nervous elk clustered at the edge of the clearing and snuffled at the fighters while they worked. The cow elks fidgeted. The bulls folded their legs underneath themselves and huddled in the dry leaves, watching for hours, until the tiny herd finally rose together and receded into the hazy wood.

  Larry’s hands were black. He was on his fourth pair of boots. November was half over, and the woodpile under the carport was shrinking as the cold set in. Only local news vans dotted the street outside the fire station in town. All the state officials down in Raleigh were still hoping for recounts or high-fiving each other over electoral college votes. No one knew they were here. This fire was a secret, Larry figured, some kind of evil the world was keeping from itself.

  In the living room, an acorn from the boomer’s stash popped inside the woodstove’s iron belly. Another one pinged against the stove wall, sharp and clear. The red squirrel hadn’t been around for weeks. Maybe he had moved his supplies elsewhere, like May. Or maybe he had given up and settled his squirrel brain on hunger, on letting it burn.

  Rain would not come. Another blaze rising out of Transylvania would soon join theirs, doubling the conflagration. In Tennessee, people were dying, suffocating in their cars as they tried to escape. That, at least, had made the papers, alongside all the stories blaming mountain people for picking the president. Larry didn’t know anyone who’d had time to vote.

  Larry’s lips were so chapped and raw, flakes of skin hung like torn plaster from his mouth. His fingers were so sore he couldn’t ball a weak fist. He couldn’t think of a place he loved or knew as a boy that wasn’t on fire. His clothes, his hair, his truck, everything he owned stunk of rank sweat and ash.

  Can I have them both, May said. I know you’re tired, Larry. But I have to ask.

  He put down his soup spoon. He turned to May and put a hand under her jaw. Her skin felt warm. His arms were weights.

  Take the lamps, he told her.

  The woodstove pinged again, and he breathed into May’s clean hair.

  Take them and whatever else, he said. Just please, honey, go on.

  WIRELESS

  The Holiday Inn Express on Richland Skyway seemed like as good a place as any for Margaret Price to maybe, possibly, stick her finger up a guy’s butthole. At least somebody had asked her to. People didn’t ask Margaret for anything, let alone sex stuff.

  Margaret’s sister Julie got asked out by men all the time, and people were always calling her for recipes and beauty tips. Men probably wanted Julie to do all kinds of things to their assholes. One time Julie even got asked to model for a lingerie ad in the Lexington Herald-Leader, but Julie declined because her ex-husband Parker would get jealous. Besides Parker, her sister could pretty much say no to whomever she pleased, and people would keep on asking. Men, everybody.

  Her whole life, Margaret watched Julie field requests, yes-ing and no-ing however suited her, and she wondered what it was like to be so spoiled for choice. For Margaret, this butt-fingering question was a real opportunity, so she wanted to make sure she handled it right.

  How it happened was, Margaret went to her fifteen-year reunion and bumped into Robbie Barnwell. After work on a Saturday, after Julie reminded her a dozen times, she put on a dress that felt papery from being so rarely worn, and she drove to the First Baptist Church’s fellowship hall across from Bentley High School. She only went to stop Julie dogging her, to say she’d survived. And maybe, just a little, she wanted to see if anybody bothered to notice her.

  Margaret parked her dinky silver Honda in the church parking lot—a seamless, fresh layer of black tar. The fellowship hall was barnlike, fifty yards from the church at the back of the lot. A church hall wasn’t the kind of place Price girls frequented. She did not stop to make herself a name tag at the welcome table out front.

  The inside of First Baptist’s fellowship hall was a sad draggle of metal folding chairs and wood paneling under a high ceiling. Someone merciful had switched off the fluorescent lights that usually blared down on the beige carpet. The place was dim. About fifty people roamed the room smiling and pulling at suit jackets, winding necklaces around fingers. Occasionally a squeal firecrackered above the music, and everyone would turn to see two people embracing. Other than that, nobody seemed to know where to look, so they clutched their beverages and stared at the children’s art taped along the walls. It was summer, so VBS kids were spending half-days making collages of the Last Supper out of construction paper and glitter. Each interpretation was a little messier than the last as the artists’ ages descended in a line down the wall, from tween to preschooler.

  Margaret slunk along the periphery until she came to a snack table in the back corner by a big rectangular window. Someone handed her a paper plate, which she gripped two-handed. She noted a few faces she recognized, then looked out the window at her car. She decided she would go home in exactly eleven minutes, which she began to count off in her head in sets of twenty seconds.

  She had nearly reached the end of the second minute when a voice beside her said, “Well, hey there, Margaret Price.”

  Robbie Barnwell was scooping punch into a red plastic cup right next to her. She recognized him immediately and felt no shock, as if he were a landmark she passed every day on her way to work.

  “Hey, Robbie,” she said.

  They got to talking, and Margaret asked about Trina Bagshot, whom Robbie had married right after high school.

  “She’s all right,” Robbie said. “Working for the state now. Child services.”

  “Y’all still together?” She didn’t ask with any hope. She was just asking.

  The snack table was covered in white paper and laden with pretzel sticks and fruit trays. A sagging blue banner above them said “Welcome Home Mustangs.” Margaret and Robbie had been decent friends all through school. Never beat each other up, never kissed. Helped each other pass algebra. There was mutual respect.

  “Fourteen years,” said Robbie. His shoulders tensed under his shirt.

  “Kids?” said Margaret. She looked at Robbie’s thick red beard and hair, trying to remember if he’d always had that coloring. Margaret hadn’t kept in touch with school friends. She had moved to Knoxville right after graduation and stayed there up until last fall, working in IT for the city’s convention center. In all those years she’d probably thought about Robbie Barnwell a total of seven times, and in her mind he always had blond hair and a dead front tooth. He looked pretty good now, compared to her memory.

  “Just one,” said Robbie. He fished out his phone and showed her a picture of a lanky kid holding a soccer ball. A woman’s arm was wrapped around the kid’s skinny shoulders, and
Margaret thought she recognized Trina’s wide, duck-bill fingernails. She had always envied girls with nice fingernails. “He’s gonna be thirteen.”

  “My nieces are littler than that,” she said.

  Somebody announced a quilt raffle to benefit the marching band, and the music switched to an old song about not wanting it to rain.

  “What about you? You get married or anything?”

  Margaret looked around the fellowship hall, past her peers from the Class of ’97, out the window. This time she looked past her car to their old high school across the road. A new baseball field was being gouged out of the south hillside, and the lowering sun glowed on the diggers and culvert pipe. She hated that old lump of earth. For decades the little hill between the school and the woods had been a mucky, dark tumor. It was the one spot no one could see from any classroom windows. The south hillside had been, in her day, the territory of bullies and potheads, a whole mess of never for any vulnerable kid. She hadn’t set foot on that soil since junior year, and she never would again. Julie had been the one to tell her they were bulldozing it. Sounded good to Margaret.

  According to Julie, they were using the baseball field funds to lay fiber optic cables around the school, bury the power lines. Bentley, Kentucky, was modernizing. The clay under the moved earth of the south hill was raw, russet, almost bloodred.

  Margaret knew Robbie knew she wasn’t married. Everybody knew, but it was nice of him to ask. Margaret shook her head in answer to his question.

  “Well, you look good. You seeing anybody?”

  Margaret shrugged. “I just focused on my career.”

  Robbie sipped punch, nodded and laughed. “Yeah, you definitely weren’t the Redneck Stepford type.”

  It was the nicest way anybody in Bentley had ever called Margaret a freak. Which she was. Always, from the time she was little, Margaret had felt off-kilter in the scrubbed respectability of this place. The few friends she’d had had all been kids from the coal camps or foster care. To this day, everybody of significance in Bentley treated Margaret like the spare button on the inside of a shirt. But here Robbie was, acknowledging her strangeness as a matter of course, without pity or derision.