Mona Says Fire Fire Fire

Nicole Dixon

From the story collection High-Water Mark, forthcoming with The Porcupine's Quill (2012)

"She believed that she would never again care about what sort of rooms she lived in or what sort of clothes she put on. She would not be looking for that sort of help to give anybody an idea of who she was, what she was like. Not even to give herself an idea. What she had done would be enough, it would be the whole thing."
Alice Munro, "The Children Stay"^Note1

November came in like a lion and is leaving like a pride tearing at its kill. As Mona Berlo stacks her wood, throwing it into a wind so strong the wood might slingshot back, she is bracing for Refugee Cove’s fall into winter by committing to a life by fire. Before, heat, like love, was convenient and temporary, a switch on the wall when needed. Now, maturity and experience tell her that both are work, are muscle-and-body rewards.

Since moving from megacity to Refugee Cove, Mona wakes up most mornings not surprised by where she is but by how easily she’s been able to fill the corners of this new life, as if someone pressed a button, clicked a mouse and here she was. Clicked a moose, as they say here. So teaching French at the district school fits into her plan, like weight loss. Her friends, those city mice, married and childrened, divorced or approaching, have a heaviness about them Mona doesn’t want to gain. The combined mass of debt, relationships, family and careers, with the added carbon and diesel in the air, is suffocating.

To better her French, she enrolled in a six-week French immersion program in Trois Églises, Québec, the summer before she moved to Nova Scotia. She and dozens of randy teens stumbled off the train at three in the morning ready to party, not study. Mona bonded quickly and necessarily with anyone close to her age and by the end of the first weekend, she and MBA candidate Jeff Hassani were the first to acquire nicknames: Monsieur D’Argent et Grand-mère.

After a week, the fervor was as contagious as strep throat in a co-ed dorm. They found themselves dizzily dancing to separatist hip hop, drunk on bottled Expor’, bumping hips on the sweaty Friday-night dance floor beside fellow students almost half their ages. And then, unable to go back to the rooms in their billeted houses, they found the lee side of a woodpile in a dewy-grassed backyard. They broke the French-only rule when neither knew the word for condom.

"I was stacking my firewood today and thought of you," Mona now says into the phone. She laughs slightly, then stops. "I'm finding myself thinking about you. I talk to you in my head. I've done long distance before. A few hours away, weekend visits. But a time zone? I want to be a grown-up. Love letters and sad phone calls seem very first-year university. Very French immersion."

"Break-ups and honeymoons," Jeff says.

"Midnight sun then weeks of darkness."

"Have you ever seen the northern lights?"

"From the plane last time I saw you."

"They don’t just look beautiful, Mona. They crackle."

•••

"Do you have a minute Madsozwelle Berlo?"

Colin's dad. No time for parent-teacher time. Mona hesitates slightly before saying, "Of course."

"Well, Colin? He's a bit upset about French. He—his mom wanted—" He pauses, his mouth shifting on his words like a horse chewing a sugarcube, "—if there'd been some last year…." He shakes his head. "Keeps getting harder," he says.

"Yes," Mona nods,though she doesn't know if he means school, or parenting, or life. Mona pretends he means teaching, and this helps her nod. Nodding calms her—the bobbing, a raft in the sun. Avoiding his eyes, she stares at his Fundy Bay Tractors cap, which, she guesses, is hiding a receding hairline.

In Québec, when Mona kept struggling with the language—oh, how she wanted to stab Dr. and Mrs. Van der Tramp so hard in the face!—Jeff soothed her. He said that the only way to learn a language was to dive into the water and hold your breath for as long as you could, until you emerged with gills. But the second trick, the secret trick, is to get past the point of panic, get to the peace that comes before drowning. She wants to relate this now to Colin’s dad but Mona has noticed in the community a habit of male ease, of keeping boys boys for as long as they can, before they have to give in to their lives of labour. The girls do better in, or care more about school. They’ll need it in the future. Most of these boys think they won’t. Once on the water, their survival suits will save them. If they wear them.

"Don't worry, Mr. Gillin. He'll be parlez-vooing in no time." Vive la révolution!

"Call me Rubin."

Rubin. Yummy.

"Then call me Mona."

"Moona," he pronounces.

•••

On the winding road from town, the birches bow towards each driver like commoners greeting a queen in her procession. The setting sun has escaped from a week of clouds, gilding the last yellow tamaracks. Mona would stop her truck, pull over, take a picture, if she wasn't already stalled on the gravel shoulder. Waiting for the kindness of a stranger isn’t what worries Mona, nor is abandoning her nineteen-year-old, $900 4x4. It’s the wildlife: she’s seen more moose and deer on this highway than traffic. There have been rumours of cougars.

Just when Mona sees through her tears that it's fully night, the highbeams of a large vehicle fill her truck. She stays in the driver's seat until Rubin's moon face is in her night window.

"We were heading back from the Santa Claus parade."

"We?"

"Me and Colin."

"Santa already." Colin is sitting behind the passenger seat like an early Christmas present, wrapped bulkily and tied with scarf, blond hair wind-licked. Mona turns to greet him, but he tucks his head into his coat. Students can't handle teachers outside the classroom walls, these unpredictable, in-the-wild collisions as terrifying as a husband and wife meeting his mistress at the grocery store. Fight or flight. Rubin revs the engine and they drive away.

"I've been waiting for this to happen," Mona says of her truck.

"Good I came along." Rubin pronounces good like lewd. "Answering the call, large or small."

"Of nature?"

"No," Rubin laughs. She hears Colin laugh too. "I’m a firefighter. I volunteer."

"Oh." Mona pictures Rubin swinging her over his shoulder, like a bag of bait. They drive in quiet for a time, then, rounding another corner, Rubin swerves away from a raccoon, who, in the road, pauses stunned in the headlights.

"What was it Dad?"

"An elephant."

"Wasn’t big enough!"

"Willabee wallabee we…." Rubin stops singing and looks at Mona. "I hit a deer once and thought a lady in a fur coat had fallen from the sky."

"Do you hunt?"

"My dad took me out when I was a bit older than Colin. But death's death—"

"Dad?"

"Yeah kiddo?"

"Can we go?"

"Hunting? You get some older, Uncle Teddy'll take you—"

"Really?"

"Sure Bud. And when you get a big buck, Teddy can show you how to string him up, dig a knife in his belly, pull out his steaming, wriggling guts—"

"Daa-aad!"

"Never cared to hunt after that," he says to Mona. "Not a popular opinion around here."

"But you fish?" Mona asks.

"I fish," Rubin responds flatly, just as they begin their descent into the village, where the trees open up and the wide bay unfurls before them. A crescent moon hangs low above the water, turning the heaving, breathing bay into liquid metal. It’s something else that amazes Mona—how much light even this sliver of moon can cast when there is no other light in the sky.

As they drive along the main road, the only way in and out of Refugee Cove, Mona counts infrastructure: hospital, old folks' home, older folks' home, store, post office, library, fire hall, school. What more does anyone need?

A health-food store, an independent cinema, a gastropub. Mona chuckles softly. Rubin looks at her but she shakes her head.

At Mona's rented house, Rubin gives Mona the name of a cousin, or cousin's cousin—who'll pick up and fix up her truck for cheap. He helps bring in her groceries, refusing her offer of money or beer for gas.

"Big house for one girl."

Woman. "Keeps warm."

"Cold now. You don’t have a furnace?"

"Just the woodstove."

"Sure you won’t freeze?"

To death? "It’s a good stove."

Living alone in the big house, Mona dresses and undresses wherever she is, spreading her discarded clothes from room to room, shedding pieces to inhabit the many spaces. So on the kitchen floor, by Rubin's foot, is one sock and a pair of red-and-white striped panties. Little sailors. Her eyes look away quickly but not quick enough, and Rubin follows her glance to the floor, to the panties. Too late; he has spied them like a fox sees a rabbit, and Mona holds her breath and closes her eyes, the rabbit frozen in the second before the chase.

"Get your fire going," Rubin says as he leaves.

•••

"You know anything about fixin' trucks? Mine's right fucked," Mona says to Jeff after she describes her day.

"You’re sounding like a local."

"Well, shit, who'd'a thunk?"

"I know the subway schedule. I've changed oil. But seriously? Sadly, I have to get going. I'm checking out this Detroit band at the Horseshoe. I'll call later. After. Promise."

"The horseshoe above my door blew down last week. Is good or bad luck?"

"Now that I could fix for you."

"The 'shoe or my luck? Ok, pack up your Robertson and move out here. The locals would be relieved I have a man around."

Jeff pauses. "Do you think about my moving there? I’m crazy about you, I’m graduating this year—"

"I don't know."

"What don't you know?"

"Whether we're too old to be crazy or too crazy to be old."

•••

The bells ring out for Sunday. Mona hears them blearily through her dreams. She can see the white wooden church through her bedroom window, the simple tin lightning rod steeple poking into a grey sky. At breakfasts earlier in the fall, when it was still warm enough to open her windows, she could also hear the choir's faint hymns as her porridge slapped to a boil.

In the Maritimes, these small churches belie the size of God. The opposite of Québec, where vigorous black devil-horses built silver, multi-steepled mountains—rocket ships to heaven.^Note2 Now with dwindling parishioners, they are as empty and cold as Mona's house, through which she tiptoes, moving thinly between the few remaining warm molecules. Waking to the realization that Jeff didn't call (as promised) is like finding her Christmas morning living room unvisited. No gifts waiting under a blinking tree, stockings hanging lightly by a dead hearth.

When she calls Jeff and he doesn't answer, her worry, for him, turns to anger as she scrambles eggs, hints at hatred as she chews, then shifts back to worry, for herself, as she stares through her frosted front door window at the low tide harbour. She runs upstairs, untying her housecoat, reaching for longjohns. Tide's out; get out.

Mona flaps in her rubber boots through the bar harbour—the enormous bowl of empty sea mud which suctions her feet down past the ankles. The landscape could be Mars, as red and uninhabited, but with gravity increased, pace heavy and reaching. Buried clams spit water through airholes as she passes. She spits back.

The wind has become several winds, swooping together and apart like seagulls. She begins to hear the mewl of an ATV advancing towards her. Wreck-reational vehicle. The back-punching wind cannot push her home fast enough and quickly Rubin pulls a four-wheeler parallel.

"Need a lift?"

"No, I—"

"Come on."

"I hate these, you know." Mona kicks a wheel.

"Not mine," he revs the engine. "Hate makes you weak."

"Have an extra helmet?"

Rubin removes his and Mona pulls it over her toque. To see she has to keep her head up, point her eyes at the sky. It smells of Rubin’s sweat, a dirtier salt than the sea air, and is warm from his breathing. She climbs onto the back of the beast, legs split wide.

"Hold on."

"Where?" There are no extra grips.

"Love handles, Mona."

The engine snarls so she can't protest when Rubin turns away from her house and up onto the beach. The four-wheeler settles bumpily into other tire ruts, and she grasps Rubin's waist firmly.

There are exceptions to rules; Plan B's are mapped along with Plan A's. Mona's Plan A—move east, reduce costs—was not only monetary but personal. Six months earlier Mona had grown tired of the chase, catch, and release of relationships. Purging her belongings began a cleanse, a fast from the past. Returning to the land, breath by fresh breath, was to be a return to herself.

Then, in Québec, she met Jeff Hassani.

Damn. She has fallen in love. Yes. Yes she has.

His not calling and her anticipation otherwise has embarrassed her. She begins to feel dangerous, and has an urge, holding onto Rubin's waist, to bite the exposed skin of his neck, open the wings of her pelvis into his lower back, ride this machine like a teenaged girlfriend. Even through their winter clothes, she feels hints of a fusing of bone, a salt flavour she has missed but now craves in her taste buds.

"You wanna see something?" Rubin asks.

"I do."

Rubin turns abruptly onto a hunting path that leads into the surrounding cape. Two-week-old snow lingers in ditches. Wind diminished, Mona's ears and fingers begin to tingle and hum as they thaw.

Rubin points. Up ahead Mona sees crimson splattered and soaking into the dirt and gleaming on the rocks.

"Fresh," Rubin says. He is talking about the kill sight—moose or deer. But Mona lightens her cling from his waist.

Eventually they reach a cleared place—only birches lean in lonely clumps among stumps of former evergreens. She can see the bay through these trees so they have come to the other side of the cape. Rubin stops the four-wheeler and the sudden quiet seems louder than the vehicle.

"What is this?"

"There's a squatter's shack down on the beach. The guy died about a month ago and the kids have taken over." As proof, Rubin kicks a beer can with his rubber boot toe.

"Did he clear this whole area?"

"Paper towels. He just cut a path."

Mona decides to stop buying paper towels.

At the bottom of a roped-off, slickened path is the low tide beach of Kettle Cove, where, in the water, beyond the arena slope of tens of thousands of smooth round rocks, sits a large, bowler hat island.

"No one home," Rubin says.

"On the island?"

"No," he smiles, "there," and tilts his head to the cabin, the tiny home as tight and neat as a seashell. She begins to bend and collect rose and white stones, their muted glow like buds in the gravel.

Rubin has marched ahead.

"We’ll check out that shack," he declares.

"Actually," Mona stands straight and looks around. The sky and sea are the same slate grey, the island deep brown. Aren't Jeff's eyes that colour? "I’m cold." Her fingers have stopped humming.

"You're cold." Rubin’s voice fills with rejection. "Come on. You're no fun."

"You sound like Colin."

Rubin tilts his head; his neck muscles tense. She knows this pose from Québec. Rubin needs a moment to understand the sounds that form his son’s name.

"He gets it from somewhere." His face darkens as he begrudgingly tramps back in the direction of the four-wheeler. Mona drops extra rocks from her hands and trots after his giant steps, pebbles in her pockets tinkling, a tiny echo of the retreating waves as they shift and disperse the shore.

Rubin doesn't say much on the ride back to her house, though he didn't say much before—the motor was too loud. But he is driving more slowly now, and Mona holds onto the edges of her seat. She wonders if his neck was that red before.

Rubin slows at Mona's door and she removes the helmet. He revs the engine but Mona shouts, "Wait!" He cuts power.

"Here." Mona pulls an oval rock from her pocket—a large, dull pearl, white with a ribbon of pink wrapping its circumference. Mona quickly adds, "For Colin. We’re studying rocks and minerals."

"Seems he studies rocks and minerals every year. All we are are rocks and minerals."

"And fossils," Mona adds.

"Stilbite." ^Note3 Rubin pockets the rock, turns the vehicle away from Mona, and double toots his horn. He zips away and she waves to the back of his neck.

•••

When Jeff finally calls close to midnight, he talks immediately and rapidly, rushing through apologies and explanations like a teacher squeezing out the last words of a pre-recess lesson: too late to call last night, up early and away this morning, no answer this afternoon, busy, busy, busy—

"Mona?"

"You woke me up."

"I miss you. I've been dying to talk to you all day. Don't fall asleep. Five more minutes. Three. Please."

Mona doesn't want to believe his explanations.

"Ok, ok. I’ll let you go."

"Let me go. Seriously. I can’t figure out the use of 'us' right now

"What do you mean?"

Like a lick of flame, she snuffs him out.

"I can’t do this right now. Us. We aren’t an us, and until we can be, what's the use of us?"

•••

Mona has fallen asleep with the cordless phone in her hand. The ringing wakes her again.

"Mona Mona Mona."

"Who is this?"

"What d’you mean 'whose this'? 'Whose is this?'" The voice mocks at a higher pitch.

Rubin. Drunk Rubin.

"Whater yer doon?"

"Sleeping. I'm working tomorrow." She should just hang up, but she doesn’t know what will make things worse.

"I want my tongue yer little pebble."

Worse.

"I have to go."

"Emergency! Emergency! Did I wake you? Sleep then, go to sleep." He hangs up. Mona’s sleep deepens with the sounds of her phone: dial tone, frantic, off-the-hook bleating, silence.

•••

Rubin’s on the deck of the red. One by one the boats are returning, managing the high-tide channel below the leafless, smudged cape. Through tonight’s rare calm, Mona can hear their motors as she watches the parade from her living room window. She learned quickly whose cousins, dads, uncles and brothers worked on which boats and whose grandfathers first owned them. She can guess which boys in her class will eventually fish and which girls will raise their children. The boats are toy-shaped, broadly crescent-bowed and flat-sterned. Green and grey and orange—crayon versions of the landscape. The last one is the colour of steamed lobster. The faraway men, their legs triangular for balance, are bending, passing, coiling and packing, readying for a quick dock, a fast exit in the eight-cylinder trucks that cost twice, sometimes three times as much as their houses. Mona decides that’s Rubin at the stern of the red boat, tossing scraps of bait to the swarm of gulls. She wonders about his smell, stronger than the sweat in his helmet: salt and rubber and metal and herring lingering on the hands and arms that look twice their size on his abridged body.

No one is tall. Height is for the city, its limited space. Here men grow wide and strong to fill the distance.

After sunset, she is counting cars in Rubin's driveway. The excuse is Colin's week-long absence.

Rubin’s truck is there, his wife’s van is not.

For a moment Mona watches Rubin through the open kitchen door. He is sitting by a wood stove in an oversized, worn brown armchair, reading the paper, bottle of beer by his woollen toe. He looks showered and fed. A log snaps in the stove and Rubin glances over at the stove, then, slowly, at Mona.

"You here for supper?" He folds the paper.

"No, I—"

"Come in, then. Don’t take off your shoes."

"Homework."

"Not done, Miss. Lobster ate it. They’ll eat anything—other lobsters, drowned bodies. Sit. Coffee? Beer?"

"No, no. I just—"

"Rum." Rubin gets up.

"Lots of Coke and water."

Rubin pours two. Mona sits at the kitchen table. The room smells like smoke and boiled pasta, the sweet smell of baby powder and used diapers under the tidied, piled clutter.

"What was for supper?"

"Batch pasta. The girls are at Tawna's mom's. They go when I'm fishen." He hands over the glass. "Here's to heat."

"Á votre santé," Mona replies. "I brought some work for Colin. Where’s he?"

"He's in Moncton 'til the weekend. His mom'll be away at Christmas. Guess someone should have called but that's responsible parenting. Why start now? Will he miss much? Sometimes a week with his mom's better than school, you know? Sometimes."

"His mom? So Tawna isn’t his mom?"

"Tawna isn't. I was seventeen when we had him. Didn't care; too stupid. You get pregnant, you only think about having the kid. What else would you do here? Babies is one of our industries. Have a kid—save the school! Why I'm fishing and why he's a shithead. But then you could say that about most of us. The homework," Rubin gets up and holds out his hand, "he will do this weekend." He takes the papers then throws another log on his fire.

"When you get off the boat, I mean, when you step onto the dock after a day on the water—"

"Or a week."

"Ok, or a week. How do you feel at first?" Mona sips and waits.

"Landsick. Did you know when there’s an earthquake, land moves like waves?"

"I taught that in science."

"Not just a drunk ol' dad."

Mona sees her pebble then, her Sunday gift, lying on a small table beside the brown chair. Rubin follows her eyes then grabs it into his hand.

"Ah," he says. "Captured." He rolls it like a coin over his fingers and knuckles, then pops it into his mouth. "I ate rocks when I was a kid," he says, the pebble clacking behind his teeth. "Wish you had been my teacher. Maybe would've stuck with school." He spits it into his hands then drops it back on the table. His saliva has darkened the pink middle red.

Mona gets up then and stands beside Rubin. She bends and reaches over his knees, grabbing the rock. She can see Rubin's teeth in her periphery, white and wet, peeking around his open lips. The fire behind her is making the backs of her legs sweat. She tilts and, losing balance, twists and straddles her left leg around his knee. Rubin's hands, on his lap, twitch just below her crotch. She straightens, then plops the pebble into her glass of rum. Tiny drops splash onto her neck, his thumb and knee.

"I want this back," she says, sitting down. "To show the class."

"Show and tell," Rubin speaks slowly, and leans forward, moaning her name. "Mohna."

"Fire," Mona says, eyes wide, pointing. "Fire, fire!" She jumps up. Papers are flaming, as is Rubin's sweater, which he is wearing. In seconds, Rubin has the sweater off, wrapped and extinguished, and has shoved the papers into the stove.

"Colin’s homework. Jesus." Rubin breathes.

"You're ok."

"Ok. Stupid. Stupid." He checks his arm. His T-shirt has a smudge of char. Nothing more. "Stupid. Fuck."

"How’s that sweater?"

"No need for mouth-to-mouth."

"No mouth."

"Neck-to-neck. Shoulder-to-shoulder." Rubin opens the kitchen door, letting in air and out smoke. He hangs his sweater on the railing.

There is a crackle then outside the woodstove, a fierce static that turns into words: Attention all firemen, attention all firemen, please proceed to the fire station, you have a fire at thirty-seven oh two highway one oh eight. All units required to respond immediately to—

Rubin lunges for the two-way radio on top of his fridge.

"Holy shit, this is a real one. That’s the old Higgins place. That crazy broad's burned it down. We always said…. Come on, come on, fuck! Let's try and get to the station. First one there gets the truck!"

•••

They just miss the firetruck. Mona drives to the Higgins place so Rubin can change, though she's driven standard as many times as there are gears. Mona forces her concentration onto the highway and away from glimpses of skin, of muscle, of hair. The truck pitches, sputters, and hiccups around each turn.

Smoke blacker than the night sky, then heat that penetrates the cab of the truck. Mona could turn off her headlights. Men are running around, shouting. Mona lets Rubin out then parks the truck. She stands on the shoulder, watching, arms crossed. The Higgins' place, the large, white century home that loomed like an iceberg at this sharp turn in the highway, is now just flame and smoke. Though the firemen have hooked up their water truck, it is as useful as a garden hose. Rubin pats another man on the back.

•••

"Hot one," Rubin says as he drives them back to Refugee Cove. "Went to school with their oldest kid. Before we got there he was trying to run in and save his track trophies. Not that you should, but what one thing would you wanna save?"

"I got rid of most of my stuff before I moved here."

"There must be one thing you still got. One thing you love."

Mona thinks.

"Jeff Hassani."

"How's that?"

"No. Yes. My partner. I have a…boyfriend. Had. Have, I guess, still."

"You sure?"

"I'm starting to be."

"Me too. The fires do that. Just wanna go home and kiss my kids. Go over our escape routes. Stop drinking and burning." Rubin pulls up beside Mona's house and looks at her. "Just bored flirting, mostly. Now it's over. You teach my kid so let's not be weird. It's too small here to be weird."

"Well look at us. Being right adult." Mona grins.

"Surprised?"

"I’m starting not to be."

"Go call your man."

"Thanks for the ride."

•••

Mona makes Moncton in time to see the metal bird's descent from the sky. Around her, friends and family chirp and sway, eyes fixed on one set of doors, the one with the sign that reads BIENVENUE! WELCOME!

She sees him. He is taller than everyone else.

"Bienvenue! Welcome!"

The rain has stopped for the dark drive back. She expects something around each corner, and then there he is, in the middle of the road, legs splayed, lowered head and antlers as big as the front of the truck.

"Don’t honk," Jeff whispers.

"Hell no."

The moose regards the truck like a leaf. He sniffs the ground, then turns, slowly walks into the woods, and disappears. Mona breathes and drives on.

"It’s a sign," Jeff says.

"It needs a sign. Moose crossing."

They come to the ruins of the Higgins house and Mona pulls over.

"And what was the cause?"

"Ashes in a cardboard box. Something everyone's done. One hot coal."

Jeff rolls down his window.

"So dark and quiet. I can smell ice and trees and wood smoke."

Mona gets out of the truck, runs over to the passenger side, leans in the window and kisses Jeff.

"That moose will be there if you go. Blocking your way."

"I’ll stay if I can start your fire," Jeff says.

"Je suis chaude."

"'J'ai chaud.' Je suis means you're horny."

"Exactement."