very autumn Wayne arrives at the school playground to rake the leaves and burn them. This is how he sees those special days: A quilt of heavy gray clouds cancels the blue of infinite possibility over the desert. Its silver seams only hint at the blinding light beyond. The air is still, thick with the sour smell of decay. Scattered around the wide stretch of lawn, heaps of summer's once green glory go up in lazy puffs of smoke. The first time Wayne did this job was a day so colored. Nineteen years later the impression has not faded. Regardless of the weather, Wayne's special days fall out of October and into his mind each year the same: the crackle of possibility, a decisive thud, a smoldering log dropped into a pile of dead leaves.

Wayne is twenty-nine. He has spent three days raking the mulberry leaves into piles. He is nearly done and pauses to oversee and appreciate the work. He has always made his piles the same way exactly, and in the same places. In the fifth grade he raked the leaves for the first time. It had not been done before that. There were barely enough leaves to create a nuisance. The school was new, the trees only saplings. The principal assigned him the chore as punishment for the terrible thing he'd done. Three screaming fire engines called, the campus evacuated. The library nearly burned to the ground. The librarian, Mrs. Ford,had had enough. She retired and very soon after died. All the kids said it was Wayne that killed her, and even though the blame was shared, he believed them.

The principal's cousin was Captain Lindsay, the Fire Chief. He taught Wayne how to burn the leaves. The principal hoped Captain Lindsay would instill a healthy fear of fire. Instead he showed Wayne there was little danger. After the fires were nearly out, Captain Lindsay turned a key and a fountain of rain shot out of the earth and doused the live embers. He assured Wayne in case of wind, rare in October in their desert valley, activating the sprinklers even sooner would keep a fire from spreading.

In sixth grade the principal asked Wayne if he would like to rake the leaves again. The good work he had done was evidence enough he'd learned his lesson and this time they'd by willing to pay him. Wayne accepted eagerly. Captain Lindsay again showed up, but in order to make his early lodge meeting, he gave Wayne the key to the sprinklers. It was then Wayne's annual responsibility. The tradition outlasted high school and even the principal's retirement. As years passed and the trees got bigger, Wayne realized he wasn't being compensated fairly. His leaf piles had grown ten times in size. Yet, when there was talk of replacing him with a landscaping firm, he found himself pleading to keep the job. He and the trees were nearly the same age and he admired how stout and fruitful they'd grown. His procession of Octobers became an anchoring vantage point from which he could measure and witness the progress of his life.

He never knew his father and lived with his mother in the same house he grew up in. His job at the hardware store allowed him to pay her a small rent for his room. She had her own life and stayed out of Wayne's. Every Wednesday and Friday she'd paint her twenty year old face over the one that had seen fifty and stroll downtown to the VFW, as if she was still welcoming home the troops. Wayne didn't know what she did there and didn't ask. She didn't ask questions either, when he quit college, or when he moved out for a year to live in a trailer park near the bus station. They had an understanding.

It had always been hard for Wayne to make friends. The only guy who let him hang around when they were kids dropped out of high school and joined a rock and roll band. He sent Wayne a letter once that described how girls would show up backstage and beg for a few minutes in which to offer themselves over for his indulgence. In the same letter he told Wayne that life only happens when you go out and grab it. The experts on Sally, Montel, and Gordon confirmed that advice. Go for it! Risk it! Reach for the Ring!

Wayne signed up for network marketing plans. In months he'd be able to quit his job at the hardware store. Be your own boss! Own your own business! Be rewarded on the basis of your own initiative. He sold reverse-osmosis water filters, vacuum-packed retort dinners, ladies' hosiery, tennis shoes and cleaning products. He put in a stint trying to sell real estate with no money down; but when he tried to convince an elderly widower to sell his house, a dozen seminar colleagues had already pestered the old man to the breaking point. Wayne was nearly blown in half by a double-barreled shotgun. Dinner clubs, computer dating, and personal ads yielded low returns of friends and lovers. With his mother's garage spilling over with unsold merchandise, he had to make peace with the reality that for him the brass ring would be a door-knocker he directed customers to on aisle three.

Wayne tosses his log, only a glowing coal now, onto the last mound of leaves, letting it sink into the center. It gives him satisfaction to light his leaf piles from one source, like a cake full of candles from one match. On his thirteenth birthday-the only time he ever had a cake and party-his mother sent out invitations embossed with clowns and balloons. She bought hats and streamers and a pin the tail on the donkey. Only Aunt Rhoda and two older cousins, threatened into it, showed up. He was sad but relieved. If his classmates had been there they'd have teased him as bad as they did Carla Taylor in fifth grade. Her mother rented a Shetland pony for her party. By that age the popular kids had discovered the skills to maintain their advantage. By seventh grade they were callous sophisticates, way past hats and streamers, into spin-the-bottle and rounding the bases.

In Wayne's ritual he zigzags a path in and around the location of a dozen childhood experiences over to the little hill with playground equipment. He likes to sit on the far left swing-it still has the original green wooden seat-and fly as high as he can over his smoking empire. The plumes rising in motionless air drop gray sky into columns over the field of symmetrically laid out mounds. While the sun descends, the hesitant flames grow brighter and stronger against the fading details of the background. It's an imposing sight, familiar, yet distinct one year from the next. Wayne can trace the arc of his whole life from his perch on the green seat. He is located in the world, a small part of a grander scheme. It's a solitary rite, profound, and always the same. He will lock his arms and lean his head way back in order to catch the first stars fall out of the bare hanging trees. But his sacrament is interrupted. In the corner of his eye a dark-haired young woman is sitting at the top of the slide. He is nearly thirty years old and looks even older. He's embarrassed to be caught in a children's playground. He bends his legs and jerks to a halt.

The young woman has her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. She isn't watching Wayne. Nevertheless his moment is lost and can't be recaptured. He starts to leave to check the fires.

"Excuse me!" comes a shout from the top of the slide, "Do you have a light?" Invisibility to sudden materialization. The girl holds a cigarette up in the air. It strikes Wayne funny, needing fire in a field of burning leaves. He likes irony. He also has a pocket full of matches.

The girl slides down and Wayne light her cigarette. She is pretty and vaguely familiar, but he doesn't know her from the neighborhood. She has soft auburn skin, nearly translucent, draped elegantly over prominent features. Her hair is short and moussed into spiky disarray; but inside the affected veneer is the broken voice of a little girl. She doesn't smoke, just flips the cigarette back and fort between her fingers.

"This is my favorite time of year," she says, using the cigarette as a kind of wand to indicate the school yard. "I've watched these leaves burning my whole life."

How could a scene that has centered his life captivate someone else? He puts off going to start the sprinklers. "Did you go to school here?" he hears himself asking.

"Eight grades. I lived across the canal and should have gone to Ingleside but it was too close to the reservation so my mother made them switch me. She drove me every day."

The cigarette flipping fingers were once the same motion twirling in and out of a little girl's ringlets. The same motionŠ same asŠ Gale Mitchell. She went to a different high school or moved away. She's changed, too, but the eyes and voice belong. She's a year younger and doesn't remember him. He never could make an impression. Every day she made an entrance, arriving in her mother's red convertible. She had the right clothes, the right lunch box, the right food to trade. She knew how to get into just enough mischief to have lots of friends but stay out of real trouble. Everything that came so easy to her was elusive to Wayne. In his own grade he was an outcast, an outsider at best. If his life had ever been normal he wouldn't remember her either.

"They hire me to watch over the leaves. I guess the school has a bad history with fire," he's testing her, "the library almost burned down once or something."

She mumbles.

"What?"

"Nothing." She pauses, staring hypnotically straight ahead. Then coming back, "I was there when it happened. Kids can be so cruel and stupid. This one kid, Scott Goodwrench or something, was really out of control. He started that fire and the librarian freaked out and died. I guess he killed her, really."

Wayne is astounded. She's got everything wrong. Scott Faircloth, a name he remembers very well, was in her own class. He was a screwed up kid and pulled a lot of pranks but nothing that ever matched Wayne's fire. How could she be so stupid? "A thing like that could carve an impression that lasts the rest of your life," he says, unable to contain his sarcasm.

She laughs but stops herself when she sees the look on Wayne's face. "I have a lot things I don't remember too well. What I do remember is the fire drill siren. The teachers were so serious but we thought it was funny. One dumb kid would always say, 'if a real fire happened now; we'd all think it was a drill?' My friend Marcy and I were so above it. We'd laugh so hard we'd get lectured about kids that got burned alive because they were giggling and didn't pay attention. We almost wet our pants."

Wayne remembers in his own grade he was the dorky kid compelled to state the obvious. The source of the burning children stories was the librarian, Mrs. Ford. Once a month, the fourth and fifth grade classes met together in the library to listen to stories and learn the Dewey decimal system. Gale was there with the same laughter. It's as clear to him as yesterday. He risked everything to fit in. He remembers exactly where Gale and Marcy sat in the room:

In the back behind the wire paperback racks. Notes were passed undetected there. Word passed that Scott Faircloth would fall over in his chair at five past the hour, or all were instructed to drop their books when Marcy sneezed. One time Wayne organized a mass coughing assault. Scott passed the note and at the designated time he went into such convulsions it took him several seconds to realize the noise exploding around him was not the unified chorus of hacking he'd envisioned. Scott double-crossed him. Everyone was laughing but he was the target. Later, when Mrs. Ford sent him to the principal for swats, his face burned so hot he never felt the paddle.

Wayne wonders why his leaves made an impression on Gale. She sizes him up and down as she stomps out the cigarette with her heal. For a second he thinks she's starting to place him. He forgets to breathe and his heart starts pounding. She looks straight into his eyes and he realizes it isn't recognition at allŠ but interest. His impulse is to tell her who he is, make a fool of her, but he stops. She isn't the little girl who ignored him. She's a grown woman, attractive too, and somehow she responds to his private obsession.

"Didn't you ever feel sorry for those kids?" he asks her, "you know, the ones who never fit in but kept trying, doing one stupid thing after another that just made the other kids hate them more?"

Her expression changes and she takes a moment to answer. "I never gave them a second thought."

Anger rises from the pit of his stomach, but he swallows it, "I suppose you had a perfect life, everything fell in your lap." This is, in fact, how he remembers her.

She laughs again and it surprises him. There's something in the laughter he didn't remember.

"That's good. You must be psychic. It was so wonderful I don't remember most of it.!" She discards the laughter mid-sentence and punctuates it with a cold stare.

"Sorry, forget it," Wayne says throwing his palms up, "none of my business."

"No. I'm over it. Gettin there anyway." She slaps her palm assertively on the thin metal of the playground slide. "It was weird. They say it wasn't my fault, never really had anything to do with me"

Wayne can see he's inadvertently lit another fire, "You don't have toŠ"

"Šthis guy, Star, lived in our back yard in this tool shed thing. He'd always just been there, I never even questioned it. He was an Indian. Pima. He told me his grandmothers and grandfathers for hundreds of years back lived inside the clouds and watched over him. When it rained it was because they were crying at how he had to live. I know Mama loved him but she wouldn't let him in the house." She stops, swallows, and pulls her eyes back to front and center. "So, anyway, he died in County Jail before I found out he was probably my father. Perfect life, huh?"

Wayne remembers what it is about Gale's laugh. The day of the library fire he was desperate to reclaim the feeling of other kids laughing with him and not at him: buoyant without pain, like he might float away. It was an experience he would go any lengths to recapture. Ducking behind the check-out desk, lighting the catalogue cards on fire, his mind was blank but for two overpowering obsessions: the prospect of laughter and its soothing caress.

Mrs. Ford was at the other end of the library chalking the Dewey categories on a black board, suspecting nothing. All the kids knew what was coming. The silence was thick, the air charged with electricity. At the first glimpse of flames licking the big dictionary on the swivel stand, Wayne screamed, "Fire!" and began to laugh as loud as he could. For a split-second there was a pay-off. The whole class roared, but the sound of approval turned quickly to shrieks of terror. The fire was bigger and scarier than mischievous boys and girls imagined. They ran for the door shouting, 'Wayne did it! Wayne did it!' Only Gale kept laughing, hysterically, maniacally, way past anything being funny.

"Nobody gets a perfect life." It's an automatic comment but after he says it Wayne knows Gale is living proof.

"They say I messed myself up to punish my mother. Even when it was really bad I still sat on the canal and watched the leaves burn. I forgot a lot and I couldn't feel much but I saw that I'd once been a kid down here on days like this. It was like holding a string tied to something way, way back that I knew I couldn't lose."

Wayne can't believe it. Gale Mitchell's real life made her suddenly attractive. "It's hard to break old patterns," he says, from experience.

"Everyone does the best they can. Even my mother. Even me!"

"I don't know... I've never been able...

"Enough drama," she cuts him off, "You must have a life besides working here. Don't I know you from somewhere?"

She looks beautiful now. A cool breeze starts out of nowhere and she cloaks her arms around herself to keep warm. Wayne imagines the long hair she had as a girl blowing softly against his skin. He can tell she wouldn't mind getting to know him better.

"It's getting chilly," he says, avoiding her question, "You want to borrow my shirt? It's all right I have another one on underneath."

"Thanks, I really have to get back. Maybe I'll see you around, though." She starts to walk away, then stops and turns. "I'd ask you over for a cup of coffee, but you must have work to do. Next time?"

"No!" He nearly shouts it. He can feel the warmth of possibility. The embrace of acceptance could be at hand. The fires are mostly out, although a few embers dance across the lawn like fireflies at the caprice of an unseasonable wind. He turns in a circle, indicating the whole school yard with his arms outstretched. "I'm done here. I could goŠ I meanŠ I'd like to go with you. Coffee sounds really good."

"Great. Everything here is under control?"

"Yeah, 'till next year." Wayne takes a final survey of his bone-dry little kingdom. He chooses to see what he's always seen but this time isn't there: night falling over a field flooded by sprinklers, glistening with calm. His mind is blank but for two obsessions: When should I tell her who I am? How will she remember me?

© Reed Hearne