A small piece of paper flutters from the pocket of Jack’s pants. It twirls a few times before catching in a patch of sagebrush a foot from me. If I don’t snatch it up, the wind will carry it away. My fingers close around the worn edge as it flickers once and folds in on itself with the tight crease down the middle.
“Hart, your…” My voice wobbles with the breeze and buries itself under the rumble of the saw and the sound of branches cracking.
He can’t hear me.
I unfold the glossy cardstock in front of my eyewear. Twofaces stare back at me through the scratched lenses. Not a piece of paper, I realize, but a picture, with a date on the back scribbled in black ink.
I tuck it in my own pocket before anyone else notices. When I’ll find the opportunity to give it back to him, I don’t know. I can’t think of a single moment when admitting to carrying something so personal of his around with me doesn’t stand to be awkward.
Back to work.
The toe of my boot kicks the giant log in front of me when I stand, and it tumbles in a barrel roll down the hill. Amber circles light in its path as the stump rolls a hundred feet down unburned fuel before catching on a tree root and stopping.
My eyes bulge at the sight of a dozen spot fires.
A set of boots shuffle, sending a mini landslide of rocks and dirt toward me.
“What happened?” McCafferty gasps.
“I…” I try to formulate my thoughts. How could I have been so reckless? “The log…” I try to explain. But how do I tell him I was distracted without showing him Jack’s picture?
“It’s okay. We’ll put them out,” McCafferty says.
The individual hotspots are spreading. At least ten feet by ten feet now.
“What the hell happened?” Jack yells, his boots raking the hillside.
“I…” I fail to speak again.I have to fix this!
I pick up my Pulaski and skid toward the fires. The mattock blade grubs the soil with each raking motion, clearing away as much brush from the flames as possible.
“Supt, it was my fault,” I hear McCafferty say from behind me. “It was an oversight. I should have flipped the log.”
He shouldn’t be taking the fall from me. He doesn’tdeserve to pay for my mistakes. But I can’t worry about that right now when inches from my face, the flames sputter and sizzle. The stubble that’s slowly grown into a shadow of a beard singes at the tips, my fire shield doing very little to protect my cheeks.
“Yes. You should have,” I hear Jack say back. “Air Tactical 6, this is Tac 3. We need a water drop forty-five degrees…” His voice fizzles out as he walks upwind toward the crew.
“Marshall, you’re with Jackson. Evans and Ramirez, you take those two on the south side. Daniels, you and I will get those three on the west. You know what to do,” Murphy says to McCafferty.
Dean marches over to me and pulls me out of the way so Marshall and Jackson can take over. “Come on. You heard what he said. You’re with me.”
“You didn’t have to do that.” I trudge along to keep up with him.
“You’ve had enough mishaps for your first season, don’t you think?”
Dehydration, fire ants, smoldering logs all come to mind. I grip the back of my neck. “I owe you one.”
We both hack at the sagebrush around our new hotspot. It’s farther from the black than the others with a lot more fuel around it.
“Yeah, you do. You can put in a good word for me with Hailey,” he says, and I stop moving.
“Wait, what?”There’s a problem between the two of them?I fish through memories of their interactions since I got here. They’ve hardly spoken.
“Just… tell her I’m sorry, okay?” he asks.
He’s working smarter. Cutting back big swaths at a time with full upper body strokes. But I’m moving faster. I’ve almost made it to the soil when I say, “What makes you think?—”
“Come on, man,” he cuts me off. “I saw you kissing her before we left.”
