Arcade was hazy, smoke hanging low and white like mist, the sky a faded orange. Before checking into the hotel, I took a ride around the Tomahawk. The entire neighborhood had been rebranded. On antiquated iron streetlights, banners said THE HISTORIC TOMAHAWK DISTRICT in a rustic hunter-green font, with an illustration of pioneers in covered wagons overlaid with a half-dissolved image of a Ute warrior. They’d removed layers of asphalt to expose patches of original brick paving, and there were fiberglass sculptures of wildlife—deer, elk, mountain lion—spray-painted bronze and erected on street corners beside benches with extra armrests in the middle.

The sun turned neon red, setting in the smoke, the mountains reduced to simple purple shapes. The horizon looked like computer animation. I felt as disoriented as I had in Retreat, unable to recall where Roland and I had found Floella’s Chevrolet or where I’d crashed after the shooting.

I did find the Avalon Homes, which were only being advertised during my visit in May. I parked and practiced using my new binoculars to study the grounds. Setting aside a few regional touches—stone chimneys, shuttered windows, quartz in the garden—the houses could’ve been the Glades. I saw a fox slink from the pines behind them, an orange glint, then panic in the open air. It broke for the road, where just a few weeks earlier it would’ve found forest.

It’s like this everywhere, I thought, the land upturned from Retreat to Mimico. A house probably already stood where Pavel’s place had ignited, suctioning up the vista. Soon there would be nothing but Avalon Homes, nothing for the people who’d been here and who, like the fox, had become nomadic and trackless, or burned.

4.

First thing the next morning, I went to the Buy Low Co. for dried fruit, bottled water, and disposable cameras. It felt as if an unusual number of people were in there, also stocking up on water and nonperishables. I had to settle for a bunch of off-brand stuff.

A woman in line ahead of me, her cart filled with toilet paper, glanced at the scant items in my basket and said, “You know they just announced evacuations in the mountains.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “Do you have friends up there?”

“I wish. Well, I don’t wish, not today. But I usually wish. I think those are the most beautiful homes in the world.”

She began stacking the toilet paper at the cash.

“The wind could change anytime,” she warned me. “That’s what they said in the Ledger.”

—