I have filled out a similar form six times in two years. I know every field. I know the order and the length and which ones I can answer in my sleep. Contact information. License number. State certifications. Clinical experience summary. Availability dates.The availability dates are always the thing that makes it real: I’m available, I fill in when, I attach my CV, I submit. Simple. Clean.
The cursor blinks in the first field, but I don’t type anything.
The dog has come downstairs at some point. I don’t hear him until he’s beside my chair, just standing there, the warm weight of him in my peripheral vision. He doesn’t put his head in my lap this time. He just sits next to me, looking at the door.
I look at the application.
I look at the door.
The screen times out. The cursor goes still. The form goes dark and the reflection in the dark screen is someone I don’t entirely recognize anymore, someone sitting in a clinic that’s not hers, in a town she knows by name now, next to a dog who isn’t hers either, not closing an application she never started.
Someone who might want to stay this time.
I don’t close the laptop but I also don’t apply.
I stare at the dark screen until the dog puts his chin on my knee, and I close my eyes and let the clock run.
“Phoenix,” I say quietly. Just to say it.
Chapter 11
Grady
Elk Creek stops being patient at four in the morning.
The tones go off and I’m up before the dispatcher finishes her first sentence, boots on, brain sorting the words as they land: wind event overnight, the fire’s made a run out of the southern drainage, mutual-aid request, all available resources. Navarro sits up like somebody flipped his switch the wrong direction. Keller is already dressed, which I have never witnessed happening. Possibly he sleeps dressed.
Diaz is in the doorway with his phone and his one face.
“It jumped the canyon,” he says. “It’s in the timber below the Breslin ridge.”
The timber below the Breslin ridge is the sentence we’ve spent all season not saying.
“Copy,” I say, and after that nobody talks about anything that isn’t work.
Briefing at 0500 in the apparatus bay, both crews, maps on the wall, Beck running the structural side and Diaz running ours in the shorthand of men who stopped needing full sentences with each other sometime in July. The fire pushed northeast overnight on a wind that wasn’t supposed to arrive until the weekend. Evacuation advisories for everything east of town.Homes at the mouth of the canyon. My crew takes a division on the north flank, anchored to the county road, cutting line uphill toward a dozer break the incident team put in overnight. Station 7’s engine runs structure protection along Fisher Creek Road.
“Questions,” Diaz says.
“What’s for lunch?” Navarro asks.
“You just ate,” Keller says.
“I ate at four. That was yesterday’s food. Technically.”
“MREs,” Diaz says. “Same as always.”
“Then I withdraw the question and also my enthusiasm,” Navarro says, and shoulders his pack, and that’s the last complete sentence anybody wastes for a while.
The work is the work. This one runs the way the bad ones run: hot early, dirty air, the sun coming up the color of a warning light and never improving. We anchor at the road and work the flank, Pulaskis and saws, one foot of scraped earth at a time, and I do the thing I’m actually for, which is watching. Wind. Slope. The way the smoke column stands up and then leans. Lookouts, comms, escape routes, safety zones. LCES stopped being a checklist years ago. It’s the shape my attention makes when I’m too tired for thoughts and the fire isn’t tired at all.
Sixteen hours in, the fire finds a way to be interesting.
A spot fire ignites below the dozer line, downslope of us, in the grass on the wrong side of everything we’ve built. Which happens. Embers travel. That’s their whole personality. What makes it interesting is the radio traffic that comes with it: there’s a civilian on the far side of Fisher Creek, a landowner named Hollis who told the sheriff’s deputy yesterday that he’d seen worse fires from his porch.
He has not seen worse fires from his porch. There are no worse fires to see from his porch.
The spot fire is between Hollis and the road out.
