Page 3 of Blazing Mountain Man

Elyse takes the first switchback above town without touching the brake, and it tells me something. Nobody drives a storm pass like this from behind a desk. She did this once—really did it, for real, before the counter.

“You drove these routes,” I say. It isn’t a question.

“Two years,” she says. “Before I ever took the chair.”

And there it is. She didn’t start stuck. She parked herself.

“So you don’t talk,” she says.

“I’m talking.”

“You’ve said four words since we left the lot. I counted.” She feathers the wheel around a stand of pines gone white on the uphill side. “I drive better when somebody’s talking. It’s a whole thing. You want me to keep us on the road, you’re going to have to hold up your end and talk.”

I look at her. The dash light catches the set of her jaw, and under the nerve she’s running on, there’s something I clocked back in the office and haven’t been able to ignore since. She spends her whole day pointing other people at the horizon. Nobody’s ever turned her around and pointed her at it herself.

I already know she’s mine. I don’t fight it. Fighting it would take energy I need for the ridge.

“Talk about what?” I ask.

“Anything. The weather. Your tragic sense of humor back there. Where you’re headed after Copper Peak.” She takes the next turn. “You said you don’t winter in the same place twice. Where’s next?”

“Haven’t decided.”

“You have weeks of work booked, and you don’t know where you go after?”

“Somewhere with a mountain and a road out of it.” The wipers thunk, thunk. “That’s the whole list.”

“That’s not a list. That’s a getaway plan.” She glances over, then turns her attention back to the road. “What are you running from, Cash?”

She means it lightly, but it hits somewhere it wasn’t aimed. I feel it go in.

Here’s what I don’t say. I don’t say that I’ve done this drive before—a different mountain, a different truck, the same fine snow coming down and the same overdue call crackling out of a radio. I don’t say that the last time I put a rope on and went up after somebody, the somebody was Craig, and I came down alone. I don’t say that I’ve spent four years making sure the only weight on my rope is mine, guiding day-trips and moving groups and men whose last names I never learn, because a stranger can’t leave a hole in you when he’s gone.

I don’t say that the second she keyed that radio and said the Saddle, every one of those four years went as thin as the air up here.

“Nothing that catches me if I keep moving,” I say.

It’s more than I’ve given anyone in a long time. She hears the size of it and has the good sense not to push.

“Okay,” she says quietly. “Okay.”

The road narrows. The plowed line gives out, and we’re on packed snow now, the pines crowding in close. She slows without being told, reading the change through the wheel. I watch her do it. She’d be good up here. She doesn’t know it yet.

“Your turn,” I say, because I want it, and because talking keeps her steady, and because I’m not ready to sit alone with the ridge coming.

“My turn what?”

“You have a wall of every place on earth and not one card with your handwriting on it.” I brace a hand on the dash as we climb. “You said everybody else gets to be the one who goes. Why not you?”

Her hands tighten, then deliberately loosen. I’ve cut to the core of her. She’s better at hiding it than most, but I’ve spent my life learning to read what’s under a surface, and something under hers just shifted.

“Somebody has to hold down the desk,” she says.

“That’s not why.”

“It’s exactly why. You leave the desk empty, people get stranded. People get lost.” She lifts her chin at the white dark ahead of us. “People end up on the Saddle in a storm with nobody watching the board.”

“You could train somebody. You could hire a Marco for the day shift and put your own handwriting on a card from anywhere you want.” I keep my voice even. “You haven’t. That’s a choice. I know a made choice when I’m sitting next to one.”