Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
REED
“ T hat’s your favorite food?” Murphy booms around a bite of bread. “Your last meal on earth and you’re asking for pickles?”
I don’t know why he’s so surprised when he’s also downing his second chicken salad sandwich. It has enough dill spears on top of it to fill a sixteen-ounce jar.
I shrug and reach for his unopened third one. “Well, if that’s how you feel…”
He punches his fist against my forearm, and my radius bends to his blow.
“Murphy doesn’t share food!” he barks.
“Jeez!” I rub my palm against the swelling red blotch. “I can see that.”
“And you wondered where I got my scar from.” McCafferty chuckles, shaking his head.
I gape from Murphy to Dean’s eyebrow and back again. “ You did that ?”
“He’s only an animal when he hasn’t been fed.” Marshall pats his smaller-than-average palm on the top of Murphy’s head. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Murph? ”
Murphy burps in Marshall’s face and fogs up his glasses.
“Careful. He doesn’t like to be touched unless that hand is attached to a six-foot-two Australian model.” Ramirez tsks, peeling back the heel of his bread and grimacing at the soggy side underneath.
“Says the dude with the sexuality of a river,” Murphy fires back.
I wince. I don’t know what the issue is between these two, but a comment like that seems too far. It can’t be easy being bisexual on a crew of eighteen guys.
“Relax, Morgan. I’m proud of my fluidity.” Ramirez winks and ditches his uneaten dinner in the dirt next to him. He jumps to his feet and starts thrusting his hips, singing “Crazy in Love.” Daniels and Evans join in and pretty soon we are an entire flock of male peacocks parading about.
“All right, children, let’s save the mating rituals for R&R.” Jack freezes with his Ridley’s grocery sack dangling from his fingertips, connecting the dots that he just used the words children and mating ritual in the same sentence. We all erupt with laughter.
“That did not come out how I meant it to,” he says, collecting everyone’s trash. “All right. It’s not safe anywhere but the black tonight. Pitch your tents.”
I watch as the guys unearth their sleeping arrangements from their line packs and assemble them on top of charred soil.
Tents , I scoff. Who would want to be stuffed in a claustrophobic coffin when you could be looking at all of this?
A stretch of stars blink to the south where the smoke is less dense. A skittish deer prances across the open field in the same direction, seeking shelter from the fire. Untouched trees sway in the breeze, and even when the scent of smoke filters through my nose with my head inches from the black dirt, this still might be my favorite part about this job. Nope . I don’t need a tent .
“You sure you want to do that?” McCafferty asks, poking his head out of the small zippered opening.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I say, easing onto my back and tucking my hands behind my head.
“Suit yourself.” He zips his tent closed, and I continue my stargazing until my eyelids grow too heavy to hold open any longer.
I don’t know how many hours of sleep slip by before an itching sensation breaks out across my face. Half out of it, I bat against my right cheek. The prickling moves to my forehead, and I swipe it with my sleeve. An uneasy feeling draws me from my groggy state as tiny pinpricks light up a path down my neck and into the collar of my shirt. I jolt up and out of my sleeping bag, rapping at my skin like it’s covered in… ants .
A prissy shriek gusts out of my lungs as I discover hundreds of ants crawling over my skin, burrowing under the hem of my shirt and down my…
I rip open the button on my pants, jerking them down my legs and off my feet. I’m busy stripping off all my clothes and discarding them on top of my infested sleeping bag when I finally notice every guy on the crew has unzipped the flap to their tent. They’re all staring at me.
“What’s the matter?” McCafferty asks with a smirk.
“There was… and they…” I’m completely naked. Waving my arms about. Trying to explain why they just witnessed a scream that could’ve only come from a three-year-old girl gust from my lungs. But the sentence dies on my tongue.
“Did I forget to mention fire doesn’t kill ants?” McCafferty winks at me as he ducks his head back in his tent.
The rest of the guys go back to sleep after some more ribbing, but as for me?
I stay up.
“Rough night there, Morgan?”
Jack materializes out of nowhere at dawn. The sensation to scratch my face overpowers my reflex to jump.
“Are you going to be ready for today?” His eyes crawl all over me as I scratch incessantly.
“Like a cat in heat,” I tell him.
His eyes follow the pattern of my hands. “Well, all right then. Let’s move out.”
The first mile of our hike is mostly flat. The next four are at a steep slope and require us to clear brush. Burn it too. It takes hours, the same motions over and over. McCafferty and I are paired on a saw team. He’s the swamper, and I’m the retriever. Any clippings he cuts I toss in a giant burn pile behind us.
We work in hand signals, the only form of communication possible with the grind of steel against wood. But when the fuel runs out after forty-five minutes, he’s the one to strike up a conversation.
“I never asked you… are you from around here? You’ve got the tan for it.”
“You haven’t asked me much of anything.” I keep my tone light so he knows I’m joking.
While we aren’t exactly friends yet, he no longer treats me like someone he despises. I’d like to keep it that way.
“There’s a first for everything.” He grabs a red Dolmar fuel can and unscrews the top.
“Bear Lake,” I answer.
Why I tell him that, I have no idea. I should have said Park City. Bear Lake is the last place I want to be thinking about right now .
“I’ve heard of it. Doesn’t it have that restaurant with the famous raspberry milkshakes?” He removes the saw’s fuel cap and wipes debris from the rim with a cloth. Then he tips the spout in a slow pour. The gas leaks into the power tool.
I swallow, forcing down the knot that tries to lodge in my esophagus anytime I think about that town. I nod. “LaBeau’s.”
Why do I picture Teddy dunking her pickle into that milkshake and laughing in the free-spirited way I loved so much? Or her bright green eyes that stood out beneath her strawberry blond bob? Or the way she would lose herself when she sketched?
I was always in awe of her talent and how much I felt when I was with her, never knowing how to express it. It’s hard to let go of.
I always knew she’d never be mine. I saw the way Miles looked at her. She painted the stars in his sky. I’m not afraid of much, but I was afraid of losing my best friends. And that’s exactly what I did.
“I’m gonna get back to work,” I say to him, and he studies me with a million-questions look.
He knows I can’t do the job without him. But he lets me go anyway. Stays behind to screw on the cap and return the empty bottle with the rest of them. A gesture that feels more like friendship than either of us cares to admit.
“Hot buckets!” Murphy yells.
A helicopter idles overhead, dropping a box of brown paper sacks on the side of the hill we’re working on. After my brief conversation with Dean this morning, I’m not in the mood for small talk. So, I study the fire while I eat my burritos.
From our steep slope, everything looks bigger: the column of smoke, flame lengths, destruction. The haze blankets the treetops and licks the open air above them. Flames crackle and dance for miles. Drenched in pink retardant powder, unburned fuel fights against an aerial attack. It’s hard to imagine this beast ever getting under control.
Jack interrupts my wandering eyes with his situation report. “For those of you who’ve lost track, we’ve got two days left before R&R. Trends are staying hot, dry, and wind driven. Division wants us to keep working the right flank toward the head. If you were on a saw team, you’re now cold trailing. I don’t want anything left unchecked. Let’s get back to work.”
Our teams work side by side, churning up the mineral soil and digging into roots in a single file line about ten feet apart. The wind beats at the side of my helmet, my fire shield rapping against my neck. But the direction keeps the smoke out of our eyes.
I drop the wooden handle of my tool in the dirt to run my bare palm over the ground I just tilled, my knee connecting with the blunt end of a log as I kneel. A flash of yellow flicks past my periphery. Before I can check for residual heat, I turn to see what it is.
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. Two faces 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’t deserve 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.”
If I wasn’t gripping my hand tool so tight, I would have dropped it.
“We’re just casual,” I tell him. Convince myself. What even makes him think she’ll listen to me?
“Uh-huh. Do you cradle every woman’s face that you’re not serious with? Because from where I stood, it looked pretty passionate.”
Wait… my eyes zero in on him. “Why do you need to apologize to her?”
“We weren’t talking about me. Why are you avoiding my question?”
I don’t know if it’s the smoke inhalation or this confusing circle of questions, but I’m lost.
“That’s none of your business,” I toss out.
What did he ask me again?
“Just like whatever you have going on with her is none of mine,” he argues. “Not unless you do something to hurt her.”
That’s when I drop my tool. “I would never…”
He smirks. “That’s what I thought. I want to believe that you’re not an arrogant asshole who always needs to be on top, but rather someone who fights for what he wants. I know you’re probably not going to listen, but can I give you a piece of advice? It might help you.”
I pick up my tool and cut the last swath of brush closing off the spread. “I’m listening.”
“From now on, choose the hard, right choice over the easy, wrong one.”
With our hotspot under control, he drops his tool and points to my mistake.
“Dig a four-foot-deep cup trench beneath that log to keep it from rolling again. ”
And I do. For several hours on bended knee.
That first hard, right choice lands me with a burning sensation that begins at my ankle and spreads up my calf.