“I’m insulted.”
“You’re eating your fourth.”
“This is my third.”
“I watched you eat one at oh-four-hundred like it was a secret.”
“That one was breakfast. Breakfast doesn’t count toward the total, that’s, that would be, there’s no integrity in a system that counts breakfast.”
Derek writes something on the helmet. Smirks. Moves down the line.
Keller, who has said possibly nine words since the wind event started, looks up from his chili mac.
“He traded me a flashlight for this,” he says. “It stopped being a pool. It’s a market.”
Ty, passing with a hose bundle, doesn’t even slow down. That’s the whole event. Station 7’s quietest human hears the phrase it’s a market, nods once like a judge affirming a lower court, and keeps walking, and Navarro laughs so hard he has to sit down in the black.
This is what I mean. The fire gets our hands and our lungs and twenty hours a day. It doesn’t get to have the rest.
My phone finds a bar of service that night on the ridge.
Maren: Your fire is on the news. The actual national news.
Me: it’s not my fire
Maren: That’s exactly what a man with a fire would say.
Maren: Scale of 1 to ceiling?
Me: no ceiling out here. just sky.
Maren: Poetry. You must be exhausted.
I put the phone away and don’t examine why I answered her in four seconds from a fire line when it used to take me three days from a motel.
Day three, 0300, I’m at Station 7 for a six-hour reset, standing in the kitchen while Beck makes coffee, which is a phrase I use loosely and he uses with pride.
He hands me a mug. I drink it, because at 0300 on day three of a wind event, standards are for the well-rested. It tastes like aboot that’s been through some things since the first boot. I must make a face anyway, because Beck says, “It’s strong.”
“It’s something.”
He takes this as agreement, which is the only way Beck takes anything about his coffee. We stand there in the dark kitchen with the radio traffic murmuring from the watch room, two tired men holding hot liquid, and it’s a good quiet, the working kind. That’s when he does it. No windup. Beck doesn’t wind up.
“Rodriguez has budget approval for another line position this fall,” he says, looking at the duty board instead of me. “We could use someone with wildland experience on permanent crew. If you ever get tired of being a tourist.”
The mug stops halfway to my mouth. I put the grin on, because the grin is load-rated for exactly this.
“Structure work,” I say. “You’d have to teach me which end of the hydrant is the front.”
“Mm,” Beck says.
“Besides, you couldn’t afford me. I’m a federal luxury item.”
“Sure.” He rinses his mug and sets it in the rack, unhurried. “Offer doesn’t expire.”
He walks out. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Fourteen seconds of conversation, dropped into a dark kitchen like it’s nothing, like it isn’t a door standing open in a house I keep telling everyone I’m just visiting.
I laugh it off. I’m very good at laughing things off. Three years of practice, elite-level technique. I laugh it off and go lie on my bunk for five hours, and the offer comes with me, and it doesn’t laugh.
