3. I’d Hate for This to Move Too Fast
I’d Hate for This to Move Too Fast
By six fifteen Wednesday morning, Jay had learned that Harris Shaw’s truck had technically been designed to seat three adults, with technically doing a great deal of work.
Jay occupied the middle of the bench seat, with Harris behind the wheel and Eli wedged against the passenger door with a camera bag between his boots.
Harris had pushed his seat back as far as it would go, leaving his broad shoulder close to Jay’s and their thighs pressed together whenever the road threw them sideways.
At six feet and built substantially enough that nobody had ever called him slight, Jay took up his own unreasonable share of the cab.
His left shoulder overlapped Eli’s on the turns; on his right, Harris’s leg stayed warm and immovable beside his.
Strong thigh. Useful observation.
Most of their equipment was strapped into the bed beneath a tarp after Harris had removed everything he considered unnecessary and Jay had put some of it back. The third tripod had stayed behind. Jay remained bitter about it.
Eli stared intently at his phone. “You actually have service?” Jay asked.
“Barely. I’m checking rankings before we lose it.”
“Your draft isn’t for three weeks.”
“That’s why I’m checking now. Injuries happen.
Depth charts change.” Eli shifted the phone away when Jay tried to see the screen.
“My brother and I have been in the same league with our college friends for nine years. I’m not listening to them for twelve months because I ignored a backup becoming relevant.
” Jay understood that part. Not the imaginary management of professional athletes, necessarily, but the long-term commitment to avoiding humiliation from people who had known you at twenty.
Harris glanced over from the road. “So none of these guys actually play together. You just pick which ones you wish did.”
Jay turned toward him. “Oh, I like you.”
Eli made an aggravated sound. “That is an aggressively stupid way to describe it.”
“Seems accurate,” Harris said.
“It’s strategy. You draft a roster, manage trades, make lineup decisions—”
Harris shifted gears, his broad hand closing around the worn black knob beside Jay’s knee. Jay watched the tendons move beneath tanned skin for half a second too long.
“You pay money for this?” Harris asked.
Attention successfully redirected.
“It goes into the prize pool,” Eli said.
“How much?”
“That’s not relevant.”
Jay smiled. “It’s suddenly extremely relevant.”
Harris nodded slowly. “So everybody puts money in, spends four months pretending to manage a football team, and whoever pretends best takes everybody else’s money.”
Eli stared at him. “You make everything sound stupid.”
“Didn’t have to work very hard.”
Jay cracked up. Not the polite laugh he gave during interviews or the short one he used when acknowledgment was expected. The real thing caught him unprepared, loud enough that he dropped his head and braced one hand against the dash while it worked through him.
“Jesus Christ.”
When he looked up, Harris was watching him. Not smiling. Not exactly. His attention had caught on Jay with the same stillness it had during the interview, as though the laugh had revealed something Harris had not expected to find there.
Or perhaps Jay had been loud enough to alarm livestock in neighboring counties.
“What?” Jay asked.
Harris returned his eyes to the road. “Nothin’.”
Eli shook his head. “I liked this trip better before the two of you started agreeing.”
“It’s one subject,” Jay said. “I don’t think we need to make anything official.”
Harris looked over. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good. I’d hate for this to move too fast.”
Harris’s mouth twitched before he faced the road again.
The rest of the drive passed faster than Jay expected. Then the trees opened without warning, and the burn scar filled the opposite mountainside.
Jay went still.
Thousands of trunks stood black and silver across the slope, some upright and others fallen into pale tangles.
Between them, young pine pushed through ash-dark ground in patches so bright they looked artificially saturated.
The scar crossed the drainage, climbed the next ridge, and continued until distance and haze swallowed it.
No photograph in the production research had communicated the scale.
The images had flattened the mountain into evidence: acres burned, structures lost, percentage contained.
The slope in front of him did not look contained.
It looked interrupted, caught somewhere between death and deciding what came next.
For several seconds, nobody spoke. Then the film began arranging itself in Jay’s mind.
Start close—charred bark, new needles, pale roots.
Hold the viewer inside the details long enough for the burn to feel survivable, almost beautiful, before widening until the scale made that first impression impossible to defend.
He turned toward Eli. “Start with the new growth.”
Eli was already opening the door.
They spent more than an hour moving from the split charcoal surface of old bark to new needles and roots bleached nearly white by weather.
Eli worked outward while Jay watched the monitor and adjusted angles until the regrowth stopped looking decorative and became what it was: small, stubborn, badly outnumbered.
Harris mostly left them alone. Jay had expected impatient glances at the time, reminders about the drive back, perhaps a detailed accounting of every useful thing Harris could be doing instead of waiting for two men to film a dead tree from seven angles.
Instead, Harris checked a nearby fence line and a water tank hidden below the road, disappearing occasionally into places that apparently contained ranch problems invisible to everyone else.
He returned without commenting on how long they had taken.
When Jay asked questions, he answered fully, if not enthusiastically.
He knew the year of the fire, where it started, which direction the wind turned, how many cattle they moved, and where crews cut line.
He pointed out the soil that washed after the first hard rain and the young pine returning so densely it would eventually require thinning.
Harris did not need to make the fire sound impressive. The mountain handled that for him.
By Harris standards, the cooperation was practically hospitality.
Farther north, they stopped at an old fire road and the creek-restoration project.
There was no devastated mountain there, no obvious before and after—only water taking a slower path through willow while insects moved above it in the sunlight.
Eli filmed the new channels, the returning growth, and cattle trails crossing the higher ground.
Harris showed them where the channel used to run, where spring runoff still caused trouble, and which sections of bank had held through the last hard season.
He crouched beside the water, pressed one hand into the soil, and rubbed the damp earth between his fingers while explaining the difference between rooted bank and loose sediment.
Through Eli’s monitor, Harris’s hands became a recurring production concern.
Jay asked him to repeat the explanation on camera.
“You heard it,” Harris said.
“The audience didn’t.”
“Could tell ’em.”
“Strangely, the film works better when the person who knows the subject explains it.”
Harris looked at the lens as though this were a design flaw in documentary filmmaking, but he returned to the creek. The second explanation came out shorter and stiffer, so Jay let him finish and asked one question about the willow roots. Harris forgot about the camera enough to answer properly.
There it was.
Later, they found a gate hanging wrong and stopped to fix it because, according to Harris, leaving twenty minutes of work until later was how it became half a day’s worth. Jay held what he was told. Eli filmed some of it.
The gate had sagged far enough that Harris had to brace one shoulder beneath the rail while Jay reset the lower hinge.
Jay did not require the sight of Harris’s forearms tightening or his shirt pulling across his back to understand the mechanics of the repair.
He received the information anyway—strictly for documentary purposes.
The day blurred pleasantly after that. They stopped when the light or landscape offered something useful, doubled back once for a shot Jay wanted, and ended at a high overlook not listed in his notes.
Jay had stopped expecting Harris to rush them.
Harris simply moved to the next repair, fence, or water problem until Jay was ready.
The ranch had become a dark cluster of trees and roofs beside a pale road, nearly incidental against the scale of the valley. Harris stood near the edge with one hand on his hip, looking down at land his family had occupied for more than a century.
It would have been an excellent shot—and exactly the noble-man-surveying-inherited-land image Jay had promised not to manufacture.
He left the camera down.
By the time they turned home, the truck bed was coated in dust, every battery was nearly dead, and Jay had enough footage to keep him happy for days.
His phone recovered service and delivered twelve messages at once: concern from his mother, a voice note from Romy, and a family argument over whether Aunt Eleni’s dinner photograph contained a mouse.
Jay enlarged the image. It was almost certainly a folded napkin, though cousin Theo had already committed to the mouse theory in two languages.
Miles had also written about the storage unit again, declaring it Jay’s problem by unilateral decree. Jay replied that he was in Montana. Miles wanted to know whether Montana lacked telephones. Jay declined to answer and put the phone away as Harris shifted gears beside him.