It sits in my chest like an ember in a stump hole, the kind mop-up exists for, the ember you’re supposed to dig out and drown because it survives the night and reignites everything. Permanent crew. Station 7. A town where the coffee guy knowsme and the bar guy feeds me and a woman above a clinic drinks out of the wrong mug on purpose.
I’m not thinking about it.
I’m thinking about wind. Wind, and division assignments, and the fact that the word tourist coming out of Beck’s mouth was doing about four jobs, and Beck is not a man who wastes even one job on a word. He watched me for three months and then priced the whole situation in fourteen seconds.
I’m not thinking about it.
The ember disagrees.
On the bunk, the plywood ceiling has nothing for me. Danny used to say hotshots don’t quit, they just miss one season and find out about chairs. He said it like a horror story. For three years I’ve been telling it to myself the same way, the cautionary tale, the reason to keep moving: don’t stop, Sullivan, stopping is how the quiet catches you. Except I’ve been stopping all summer. Little stops. A clinic doorway. A pour-over lesson. A kitchen floor. The quiet caught me weeks ago, I’m still here, and nothing about me has burned down.
I sleep five hours without the ceiling’s help. First time for everything.
Sloane is running her own fire.
I get the reports the way everything moves through this town, sideways, from everyone. The clinic’s become a field hospital for the displaced: evacuated dogs stacked in kennels, barn cats in the exam room, someone’s iguana in the supply closet under a heat lamp Janet regards as a personal insult. Sloane coordinated the livestock relocations out of the advisory zone, Morrison’s cattle to the fairgrounds, the Breslin horses to a ranch west ofthe river, in one day, off the back of her truck with a clipboard and a voice the ranchers have apparently decided is federal law. Louie the llama got relocated on day one, under protest, and spat the entire ride west with his usual accuracy, which is to say he hit nothing he aimed at. Cal describes the whole operation to me with reverence, and Cal has watched me eat fire on a ridgeline.
We cross paths twice in four days. That’s what the peak of a season leaves you.
The first time is at the station, day three. Her truck pulls in during our reset with a crate of medical supplies for the engine company, the kit exchange she and Hanna have been running all summer, and I carry it in from her tailgate because my hands want a reason.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she says. There’s ash on her sleeve and a pen behind her ear that I’d bet money she’s been looking for.
“You’re supposed to be a small-animal vet.”
“I contain multitudes. Yesterday one of them was an iguana.” She looks me over with the triage eyes, quick and complete. “Water, not just coffee. And eat something that didn’t come out of a foil bag.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Forty seconds, maybe. Diaz is calling from the bay and her radio’s going and there’s no version of this day with room in it. She squeezes my wrist once, above the glove line where the skin is bare, and it lands like a whole conversation. Then she’s back in the truck.
“Pen’s behind your ear,” I say.
She checks. It is. “That’s the third one today,” she says, to me, or to the pen, or to the situation at large, and drives off, and I stand in the lot grinning at nothing until Navarro walks past and tells me my face is embarrassing the crew.
The second time is the Watershed, day four, 2200. Both crews stagger in during the same reset window and Big Jim moves through the room with the calm of a man running a triage tent, deciding what everyone’s eating. He sees me and turns to the kitchen. “Burger.” He sees Sloane come in behind me, smoke in her hair from the wrong kind of proximity, dog trailing her like a staff member, and says, “Two.”
We end up at the bar side by side, too exhausted for language. She smells like smoke and antiseptic. There’s a bandage on her left forearm she waves off before I finish inhaling to ask. The mounted fish judges us both.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I say.
Her shoulder settles against mine and stays. Big Jim sets down two burgers and refuses money from either of us with one economical headshake, and we eat leaning into each other at the bar while the dog works the room like a junior senator.
“You look terrible,” she says, around a fry.
“You have a bandage.”
“Occupational. A cattle panel and I disagreed about geometry.” She dips the next fry with surgical precision. “Eat your burger.”
This is what we get, this week. Forty-minute windows, shared exhaustion, her shoulder against mine while the jukebox does something mournful in a new key. It shouldn’t feel like enough. With the last three functioning neurons I have, I take stock: I’ve been less tired in my life and never once this located.
She goes back to the clinic at 2240 because somebody’s evacuated retriever is post-surgical and she doesn’t trust the sutures. I watch her truck pull out. When I turn around, Cal is on the stool next to me, materialized in the way of Cal, holding a root beer he definitely didn’t order because Big Jim decided.
“You know we can see you, right?” he says.
“See what?”
