Chapter 13 #2
“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?”
“The thing where you pretend you’re fine while your whole face is doing a different thing.”
“My face is doing one thing.”
“Your face is doing about six things and none of them are ‘fine.’” He rotates the root beer a quarter turn.
For a second the sportscaster drops, and it’s just Cal, tired as the rest of us, watching the door she went out of.
“Sixty hours of watching you two hand each other supplies and lean on each other like scaffolding. I’m not even taking notes anymore.
There’s nothing left to analyze. The analysis is done. ”
“Cal.”
“I’m just saying the data’s in.” He drinks his root beer. The sportscaster comes back up like a garage door. “Also Derek’s MRE market crashed. Keller cornered chili mac and Navarro’s challenging the breakfast rule in arbitration. It’s the Wild West out there.”
I don’t answer either half. Both halves land anyway.
Dawn, day five, and the wind finally runs out of conviction.
I’m on the ridgeline with Diaz when it happens, and you can feel it before the instruments agree: the gusts losing their edge, the smoke column standing straighter and then leaning back over the black like it’s tired too.
Overnight the line held on the northeast corner, the burnout took the canyon grass the fire was counting on, and now the whole eastern flank is turning from a fight into a chore.
Containment math starts working in our favor for the first time in five days.
Below us, mop-up crews are already gridding, and the smoke going up is the lazy kind, the done kind.
Below that, Copper Ridge. Still standing. Whole.
The light comes up pink and ash-filtered, and from here I can see the whole shape of the place, the river doing its bend, the steeple, Main Street running its length like a spine.
The Watershed’s neon is still on because Big Jim has been feeding shift changes all night.
And at the far end of Main, small enough to cover with my thumb, the clinic.
One window on the second floor. She’s down there, asleep or pretending to be, with a post-surgical retriever downstairs and a dog on the exact center of her bed and my mug, the one I drink out of now, in her cabinet to the left of the sink.
The first quiet in three years that doesn’t hurt is down there.
“Good line,” Diaz says, beside me. From Diaz that’s a commencement address.
I’m already drafting the day in my head. Grid the black along the canyon, cold-trail the edge where the ground’s still warm, sign off the division, and maybe, if the fire keeps its word, steal four hours and drive to the far end of Main Street with a coffee I made slowly and correctly for once.
My radio crackles.
“Sullivan, Diaz.” Dispatch relay, then the superintendent’s channel patching through, and I know what it is before the words arrive, because I’ve heard this exact traffic at the end of every season for thirteen years.
“Rotation’s confirmed. Demob in ten days, reassignment south, briefing to follow. Confirm copy.”
Ten days.
Diaz looks at me. One face, full weight.
The fire below us is turning. The town below that is waking up.
Somewhere down there a clinic and a whiteboard and two weeks that just became a math problem with my name in it, and thirteen seasons of my life on one channel asking me to confirm copy, and the answer is a single word, and I’ve said it ten thousand times.
I look at the town.
I don’t pick up the radio.
“Sullivan,” the radio says again.
I don’t pick it up.