The Fires We Can’t Control

47 I n the first week of June, after thirty-eight days of drought, in the hottest Colorado summer on record, Durango passes a fire ban forbidding cookouts, trash burns, and cigarette smoking outdoors. The same morning, I read in Cosmo that we can heat up our love life if I pen a list of five sizzling moments you’ve given our marriage. I’m instructed to tuck this gift in your briefcase or lunchbox—white collar or blue, it doesn’t matter; this is a surprise all men will enjoy. Your response, Cosmo promises, will ignite our bedroom. Lately, we’ve suffered a fire ban ourselves, neither of us much interested in matches. And sitting at the kitchen table to write you up, I can’t think of anything except the thin varicose vein, the signature of old age, that scrawled up my thigh in the last week. This kind of thought douses the mood, and though my three years at the Durango Herald ought to help with writer’s block, I manage only one sizzler before I quit the assignment. I tear the sheet of paper from its pad, fold it into a tidy square, tiptoe into the study, where you keep your briefcase, and slip my hand, with its gift, inside the front compartment beside your wallet. I let go of our moment—the afternoon you attempted to climb Mt. Sneffels, missed the summit, but came home grateful to be alive. Funny thing, though: when my hand pulls out of your briefcase, it’s holding another letter, postmarked from Naturita, a trailer-trash town on the flip side of the San Juan Range that I’ve heard Deliverance jokes about but never visited . The envelope is purple. The letter is, too. It begins: I’m lying in a bubble bath, the suds barely covering my nippels. Some woman named Lori has beat me to the Cosmo punch. Lori misspells nipples. She misspells salon, too; she’s gotten a bikini wax in your honor at the local saloon. Or maybe a bikini wax is some flirty mixed drink. Lori’s got a husband, her own big sizzler she calls The Monster, and while the other affairs have alThe Fires We Can’t Control jill patterson The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet CRSUM09 fiction.indd 47 5/22/2009 12:33:19 PM colorado review 48 ways found ways to refer to me without writing my name—The Mayhag, Shackles, or simply my initial, E.—Lori calls me The Doll, which sounds complimentary, but by the end of the letter, I see it’s a reference to amateur voodoo. Because The Doll holds hostage the life meant for her, Lori has stuck a pin in its thigh. Lori spells its, meaning “belonging to,” with an apostrophe. I am my thigh. On Sunday, June 9, an urgent voice crackles over the scanner I listen to when fishing for stories for the Herald. It’s 2:30 p.m. The voice says, “We have a confirmed wildland fire, Missionary Ridge Road.” A spark—the cause of which won’t be determined for weeks— has triggered a blaze in a ditch ten miles northeast of Durango, near the entrance to the Weminuche Wilderness. From us 550, seven miles away, travelers see flames as tall as twenty-story buildings, and a plume of smoke, thirteen thousand feet high, blossoms like an atomic mushroom over the mountains. Frequently you brag that I’m the type of woman a man marries because she isn’t always yapping, yapping. Sometimes a woman mimes a good marriage because words light fires she can’t control . At first, she keeps quiet because accusations might make her husband leave. Later, she stays mute because a conviction means she should go. I don’t know why Lori’s letter angers me after all the years of evidence—e-mails, text messages, phone records, Valentine cards, roses to you, gifts wrapped pretty that I find in your closet but never see again, an endless list of recipients. Maybe it’s Lori’s stupidity that’s offensive. If you’re going...