Heat

It was a Thursday in late July, the hottest day of the hottest summer anyone in this town could remember. The sunlight poured down like melted honey, making everything and everyone hot and sticky. It was easily ninety-five degrees in the shade, about a hundred and ten if you were dumb enough to venture out. Leaves hung limp in the still air. Lawns had turned yellow weeks ago. Even the finches and chickadees that basically ran the neighborhood were too tired and hot to chirp. The only things that seemed to have life in them were crows and cats. There was some hope, however; in the west, still some distance away, purple storm clouds were piling up. Periodic lightning bolts flickered through the huge mass of what we all knew was basically a bunch of water droplets hanging out together. But as with humans, when you get a bunch of anything together chaos usually ensues, and what is more chaotic than a thunderstorm?

Me and my friend Hands were hanging out at his house, because his parents had central air and mine did not. (His real name was Tyler, but our circle called him Hands because he had the biggest damn hands you’d ever seen. He also played for the school football team, and those guys all had fun nicknames.) Both of his parents, as well as both of mine, were at work. It was about one in the afternoon. We were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. We had played video games for most of the morning, but we both got a little burned out on it and agreed to find something else to do. There was nothing good on television, and Hands and I were not really television-watching people.

One of my favorite things about Hands, and the primary reason we are friends, is that he likes to read. More specifically, he likes to read science fiction, which was also my jam. We can talk about books and our favorite authors. We recommend good books and sometimes even book series to one another. He was the one who introduced me to the wonder that is Isaac Asimov. I had shied away from his work, feeling kind of intimidated by it, to be honest. But Hands quite deftly put my anxieties to rest and gave the Foundation Earth series such a great review that I had to pick up the whole set. In the other direction, I recommended Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy. He had read The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoyed it enough to buy a copy, but he never delved any deeper into her work Once he read the first book, he was completely hooked.

We were both Dungeons & Dragons nerds, as well, and had a group that met weekly. A game was out of the question; three of our five-member party were off with their families, making some memories before the school year started. It would be stupid for the two of us to play alone. We were bouncing around the idea of writing a campaign, though. Usually he and I came up with the basic outline of each campaign, because we were also both creative, especially when it came to writing. We were playing a fun game where we each try to out-do each other with monsters the party would have to face. I would suggest a Mimic, he would up it to Beholder. Back and forth like that, and then we pluck a few from the list and work them into the outline, in order of difficulty.

So we were playing that game, and we had to stop when Hands said “dragon” after I said “water weird.” The word “dragon” in this game is the signal that we are out of ideas. We sat together at the dining room table, brainstorming at this point, both of us throwing out ideas but me doing the writing because Hands has awful penmanship in spite of, or possibly because of, his enormous extremities. We wrote out the campaign outlines by hand instead of a computer because we can circle, underline, and draw arrows all over the page, linking ideas and emphasizing certain plot points. Dungeons & Dragons really is kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or even a video game: interactive storytelling. We hashed out a campaign outline, gradually guiding our characters to face bigger and bigger challenges before the ultimate puzzle they had to solve in order to obtain this campaign’s MacGuffin, in this case a magic flute that would, if played at the right time, cause a short-but-profitable rain of gold coins to rain down gently on you and only you.

Writing the campaign took us about an hour. Then we were out of things to do again. We sat in silence for a moment, both of us thinking hard. Then Hands turned to me and said “There’s this little abandoned cabin out in the woods just south of here. I saw it when we went camping last month. Want to go check it out? It will be cooler in the woods by the lake. And the cabin is surrounded by water and trees, so it won’t be as hot as it is on the sidewalk. Maybe bring some trail mix and marshmallows, just in case there’s a firepit. We can take my car. We’ll have to get gas, but I still have allowance money.”

The biggest difference between me and Hands is that his parents are loaded, and mine are more working class than affluent. My dad operated a machine at the local potato chip plant, They didn’t pay well, but about half the town worked there, mainly because they had no choice. My mother was a teacher who worked year-round because she also taught summer school. Otherwise, we would not make enough to eat and pay the rent. Hands’ father was an architect with a PhD. His mother was a professional artist with her own gallery. One of her paintings would sell for a grand, minimum. But Hands never rubbed it in my face, never acted like he was better than me. Our friendship meant more to him than that.

Hands drove a small tricked-out pickup truck in this glossy cherry color. He called it “Little Red.” It was his first vehicle and he loved driving it. We ran the AC and he drove us out of town and into the woods. The deeper we got, the closer the trees were to the road. Or, rather, this glorified trail with trees arching overhead like the ceiling of a cathedral. It was a good ten degrees cooler in the forest, and Hands had promised. Soon we turned off the air conditioning and just rolled down the windows. The air was filled with the exhilarating scent of fresh pine tar and the nourishing earth itself. The birds here were a bit more perky than those in our neighborhood, and we were serenaded with chirps and chirrups and even the occasional hoot of an owl. There was also a sound that I couldn’t place at first. It was a rat-a-tat-tat sound. I heard it coming from a few places. Then Hands said “I didn’t expect to hear woodpeckers out here.” So that’s what they were.

Eventually Hands turned one last time, and we drove down a gradual slope. Ahead I could see a small shack, not even big enough to call a cabin. There were two unglazed windows on the other side of the doorway. No door. There was a firepit in the clearing the shack stood in. We parked in front of the little building -was it too small to call a “building” or was the word “structure” more accurate? At any rate, we climbed out of the truck carrying the cooler that held our snacks, drinks, and marshmallows.

The shack itself was built of two-by-fours and plywood painted in some faded shade of green. The roof was made of corrugated metal. The windows really were just holes; there was no indication that they had ever been glazed. I pulled my phone from my pocket to take a picture of the shack when I noticed that I had no bars and no wi-fi. The battery was also almost dead. No worries. What the hell would I need a phone for in the middle of the woods? If we ran into trouble, we could run back and find the ranger station I glimpsed on the way out here. They would have a land line. Inside the shack, it really was cooler. To our surprise, there as actually furniture in here: two cheap folding chairs facing each other, a cheap plastic table between them. In one corner was a box that contained a lot of empty beer bottles. Looks like somebody found this place. The floor was just packed earth.

We sat on the chairs for a while, just talking about books and laughing now and then. Hands had filled a large thermos with cold ginger ale, and we sipped that while we talked. Then Hands suggested we take the chairs outside, build a fire, and roast some marshmallows. The firepit was located next to the shack, positioned so you could see the lake. Hands and I held marshmallows over the fire and ate them until neither of us could force down any more. Then we turned our chairs and looked out at the lake. The storm was closer; the thunderheads had almost reached the far shore, just visible from where we sat. We watched the storm roll in, moving faster than anyone ever wanted. Soon it was above the lake, and tongues of lightning started striking the water. We were not concerned; lightning struck tall things, and we were surrounded by trees. When the storm came closer, we listened for the sound of rain, but this appeared to be a dry storm, all lightning and thunder without the soothing sound of rain to balance it out.

We were just about to go inside again, just in case it started to rain, when a bolt of lightning came crackling from the sky and hit the shack right in the middle of the galvanized metal roof. There was a split second of silence, and the shack exploded. The thunder that immediately followed made my ears ring. Hands and I were blown right out of our chairs and into the woods. He got the worst of it, since he had been sitting closer to the shack, but neither of us were knocked unconscious or anything. We had a few bruises from when we had bumped into trees, but that was all. We went back to the clearing and the remains of the shack were burning merrily, the fire slowly starting to spread. Both of us grabbed our phones, knowing you could call 911 even without a signal. But my phone was dead and his had been shattered by the explosion and wouldn’t turn on.

“You’re going to have to run up to that ranger station and get help. I’m going to use the cooler to ferry water from the lake to the clearing,” Hands said.

“Why?”

“To make a wet zone, keep the fire from spreading into the woods.”

That made sense. I booked it back up the driveway and to the bigger track. Still running, I turned right and kept my eyes to the left side of the wheel ruts, looking for the station.

I found it, and it was deserted. Looked like it hadn’t been in service for years. In frustration, I punched the wall and hurt my hand. I ran back, to tell Hands that we were on our own. Together, we kept creating that wet zone until we were satisfied that it would work. Thankfully, it seemed to. The fire got to the circle of water and just kind of died there. Shortly thereafter the rain came, drenching the forest and what was left of the burning shack. I stood there and watched the flames slowly dwindle away.

There was a crunching sound, and then Hands stood next to me, following my gaze to the pile of smoking rubble and ring of scorched trees.

“Well,” he said, “that didn’t go as planned.”