The Valley

The smoke was already a wall on the west side of the valley when Sophie turned onto her father’s road, and above the wall the pale afternoon sun had gone the color of a bruise where it tried to come through and could not. She had left Reno the moment her phone said the fire had a name. Davis, it said, for the creek and the day-use park at the foot of Slide Mountain, and she knew that park, had eaten sandwiches there as a girl in the thin shade of the cottonwoods with the mountain standing straight up behind it, and she knew that a fire starting there on a hot Saturday in September, with the wind already up, would not stay small.

The freeway was closed. She had come down the frontage road on the east side of the valley instead, past Washoe Lake lying flat and low, mostly playa this dry year, and the whole way she drove she watched the far shore burn. The fire was climbing the Carson Range across the water, a mile of orange laid along the base of the mountains, and the wind was carrying it north, toward the Mount Rose road and the edge of the city she had just come from.

Her father was on the porch. He was seventy-eight and he sat in the metal chair he had sat in for thirty years, watching the mountain the way another man might watch a ballgame.

Raymond had built roads once. As a young man he had run a jackhammer on the crew that cut the interstate through the north side of Reno, had helped pour the concrete that split the town from the hills, and he had never in Sophie’s hearing pretended to be proud of it. It had been work, and there had been little enough of it for a Washoe man in those years, so you took what came and you did it well and you did not ask the road where it was going. He liked to say the land did not hold a grudge. She had never believed him, and she was not certain he believed it either.

“They called for the whole valley to go,” she said, coming up the steps. “New Washoe City, Pleasant Valley, all of it. Half an hour ago.”

“I heard the truck come through.” He did not get up. “Power’s already off. Went off around three.”

“Then there’s no reason to sit here.”

“No reason to run before you’ve looked, either.” He nodded at the mountain. “I’ve been watching where it wants to go. It wants to go north, up the canyon. Not down here. Not yet.”

She stood beside his chair and looked with him. He was right about the wind, she thought, for now, and that was the trouble with him, he was so often right about the smaller thing that he would stay too long inside it. The valley below them was a shallow bowl, the range going up on the west, the dry sage hills on the east where they stood, the lake in the middle catching the last of the ruined light. Her people had wintered in bowls like this one for longer than there had been a word for a year. The valley carried their name because they had been in it, not the other way around. In summer they had gone up to the big water, Da ow, the lake that the whole world seemed to pour into, and in the cold they had come back down to the valleys to wait the winter out among the pinon and the marsh. Fire had always come. Fire was how the country cleaned itself, in its own time, low and slow through the grass, and the people had set it themselves in the old days to keep the brush down and the meadows open. This was not that fire. This was a hot wind pushing a wall.

“Dad.”

“I hear you.”

A sheriff’s truck went by slow on the road below, its speaker saying the same three sentences over and over into the smoke, the words coming apart before they reached the porch. The dog, an old shepherd mix named Buck, came out through the screen door and pressed himself against Raymond’s leg and would not settle.

Raymond put his hand down on the dog’s head. He looked at the mountain a while longer, and Sophie watched his face and did not push, because pushing him had never once worked and she was forty-seven years old and had finally learned that much.

“I built a road,” he said, “and they told us it would last a hundred years. And here I am and the road’s still there and half the men on that crew are gone and the mountain’s on fire and none of it lasted the way anybody said.” He pushed himself up out of the chair, both hands on the arms, slow. “Get the box off the kitchen table. It’s already packed. I packed it in ninety-nine when the last one came close and I never unpacked it, and your mother laughed at me for it every day she was alive.”

The box held what she would have guessed and a few things she would not. The papers. A cigar box of photographs. A coiled length of his mother’s basketry willow, cut and cured and never woven, gone the color of honey. A single degikup start no bigger than a teacup, three rows of stitches and then nothing, that some woman in the family had begun and set down and someone after her had thought worth keeping through every move for eighty years, the unfinished thing more carefully saved than any finished one.

She carried it out. He was already at the truck, easing the dog up into the back seat. The light was going fast now, not to dusk but to a false brown dark, the sun swallowed whole, and ash had begun to come down in the yard, soft, unhurried, like the first of a snow.

“You want to look at it once more,” she said. It was not a question.

“No.” He got in and shut the door. “I looked plenty. Drive.”

She backed out onto the road and turned north, into the line of taillights already strung out along the frontage road toward the city, everyone leaving the valley at once, slow, patient, nobody honking. In the side mirror the mountain was a single orange seam laid against the black, and her father did not turn his head to it, not once, but she saw that he had tipped the mirror on his door down so that he could watch it go without anyone seeing him do it, and neither of them said a word about that the whole way out.

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