Blaze sat up, the top sheet slithering around his hips. Gabe looked away as Blaze adjusted himself in his sweatpants, sunlight pouring through the end of the tent, through the screen, gold strands, dust motes in the air. The canvas of the tent starting to warm, the breeze full of rushing damp from the night before.
“Shall we get some breakfast?” asked Gabe. He sat up, as well, and rubbed at his eyes, and wondered again at the simple pleasure of it all. When he’d started this job, this was not the picture that had risen in his mind, nor the feeling.
“Yeah,” said Blaze. He stood up, stripped, and stepped into his blue jeans and pulled on a t-shirt, not turning or shielding himself, and Gabe imagined he must have learned this lack of modesty while in prison. Not that Gabe stared, no. He concentrated on getting dressed himself, on making his bed, the latter of which drew Blaze’s attention to him.
“What?” asked Gabe as he finished, turning to look at Blaze, who was scowling slightly at him.
“Do you do that every day?” Blaze asked. “I mean, we had to in prison, but I didn’t know people did that in real life.”
“I picked up the habit in the army,” Gabe said. “It makes it nice to look forward to, getting into a bed that’s been made.”
It was mundane, all of this, talking about making beds, thinking of the schedule for the day. When what he really wanted was to follow impulses that should never see the light of day. That he should never give in to.
“Ready?” asked Gabe, lacing up his work boots, then grabbing his toiletry bag.
Silently, Blaze followed him along the path to the facilities, then back to his tent to drop off his things before heading to the mess tent. Wayne was already there, nose-deep in a mug of coffee, looking content at his solitary state, but giving them a nod as they sat down.
“What’s on for today, boss?” asked Wayne, thankfully not asking why Gabe and Blaze seemed attached at the hip. They were, though Gabe couldn’t actually find any reason to complain about that.
“Well,” said Gabe, tucking into some amazing eggs and bacon. “Four horses need to be taken up to the forge; Blaze and I can do that if you, Wayne, will finish marking stumps. This afternoon, we can run some logs through the wood chipper and I thought—” Gabe paused because while he really didn’t want to be seen to play favorites, it was already a done deal. “We really need to haul those chips up to Chugwater and Whiting. There are two landscape companies there who would greatly appreciate it.”
“Count me in,” said Blaze, sitting up in his seat.
Wayne shook his head. “Does that mean I get the afternoon off while you’re gone?”
“You sure do,” said Gabe. “You are at your leisure.”
This seemed to satisfy Wayne, who liked being on his own.
With breakfast over, Gabe and Blaze went down to the pasture, doled out flakes of hay, checked the water tanks, and used Gabe’s rope trick to grab the four closest horses and halter them.
Between the two of them, they quickly groomed the horses, and Gabe took some pleasure in how Blaze followed his lead, copied his motions, learning fast, showing very little fear of the horses as some novices might.
“You seem pretty good with them,” said Gabe as they clipped leads onto the four horses. Taking two each, they led the horses out of the pasture and up the road.
“Ponies,” said Blaze with a little laugh that lit up his face, even in the shadow of the pine trees. “Lots of ponies. A kid’s ride, you know? Where they have five or six little Shetland ponies all roped to a ring that went slowly around, and the kids don’t know any difference, right? They get to ride, and the parents take pictures.”
Taking care of a kid’s ride like that didn’t make a man good at horsemanship, so maybe Blaze had, among his carney talents, a streak of cowboy running through him. But rather than dig for more of Blaze’s past, Gabe held himself back as they walked in companionable silence. The switchback was on the steep side, but they took it slow, and it was only a mile or so beyond that to Jasper’s forge, anyway. A good, healthy walk.
At the forge, Jasper and Ellis, his assistant, got right to work. Gabe and Blaze said yes to two bottles of water and a seat in the shade, their attention focused on the bellows that Ellis pumped, old fashioned leather ones that had to be worked by hand, and the sparks that flew from Jasper’s hammer as he shaped each shoe to fit each hoof.
In short order, he and Blaze were leading the horses back to the pasture and giving them extra flakes of hay for behaving so well. Then they had lunch and were in the woods at the chipper before the afternoon grew hot.
With Wayne manning the chipper, Blaze handed him the large branches and sticks that Gabe drew over. They were going to need to empty the truck, then use it to haul the wood chipper deeper into the woods. The work might take them all summer, which was not a bad way to earn some money and get that loan for his ranch.
It was around three in the afternoon when he and Blaze clambered in the truck. With Gabe driving, they went through the cutoff to the no-name road to Farthing, and beyond to Highway 211 on the way to Chugwater.
The dump truck was on the old side, and the seats had little cracks, a dusty plastic smell coming from the vents. But if the engine strained going up hills, it was hauling over ten thousand pounds of damp chips, which would make a mighty fine mulch for many gardens.
Best of all, they silently agreed to drive with the windows down, which they had to crank open by hand. Gabe shut off the A/C vents, which smelled, and then he could enjoy the scenery and the air and the sight of Blaze settling back into the cracked plastic seat, his arm on the open passenger window.
The smile on Blaze’s face made him more like he was a regular working man, not an ex-con, not someone who’d spent two years in prison. But someone Gabe would like to get to know.
“We’ll head up to Whiting first,” said Gabe, shifting the gears down as they went up the first big hill as the road headed east, shadows behind them. “Then come down to Chugwater.” He looked over at Blaze as the dump truck hopped over some bumps on the road. “You ever drive one of these?” he asked. “Want to learn?”
Maybe teaching an ex-con how to drive an H-box stick shift on a beater dump truck hadn’t exactly been on the syllabus for the summer, but it had been a skill Gabe had learned in the army and had come in handy more than once. Plus, if a man could drive a dump truck like this one, he could drive anything.
“Sure,” said Blaze. Wind whipped through his dark hair, flipping around his ears, sliding over his green eyes.
