Page 65 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

She heads inside, and I stand on the porch a minute longer, shirt still in my hand, thinking about how I'd only planned far enough ahead to give her a good date tonight. Dinner. The drive-in. Getting the details right.

I hadn't thought about what came after. Wanting another one. And another after that.

Not just until the assignment in Timber Creek ends.

After.

twenty-three

Ivy

The trail's been dusty for days, the kind of fine, powdery dust that hangs in the air after someone walks through it instead of settling right back down. Trevor's a few yards ahead, and every step he takes kicks up a small cloud that lingers behind him like it's in no hurry to go anywhere.

I haven't seen real rain since the night before Beck and Reid left for Elk Ridge.

“Feels different than it did a couple weeks ago,” Reid says, crouching to pick up a piece of grass that snaps clean in his fingers instead of bending. “This should still have some give to it.”

“Everything's cured early this year,” Tessa says. “We haven't had anything worth calling rain in what, over a month?”

The whole district's got that late-summer tightness to it, vegetation gone from green to gold faster than usual, the ground hard and dry underfoot, heat sitting heavier in the afternoons than it did back in June.

We're doing fuels work today, clearing brush along a section that Russ wants thinned before things get any drier. There's an added carefulness to how everyone handles equipment, an awareness that wasn't quite as present a month ago. Nobody says the word fire more than usual. We don't have to. It's just there, underneath everything, the way it always is this time of year, except a little closer to the surface now.

It's strange, working through all that while carrying around the quiet happiness I've had for the last couple of weeks. Beck came home from Elk Ridge. We hiked the old burn. I taught him to make lefse, badly on his end but enthusiastically. We had our first real date, dinner and a drive-in and his shirt smelling like him for the rest of the night. Small, good things, stacking up one after another, until somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of any single day as remarkable and started just expecting all of them to be good.

Maybe that's why the dust concerns me.

At lunch, Russ gathers everyone in the shade, water bottles and sandwiches passed around, and gives us the bigger picture.

“Dry spell's not just us,” he says. “Whole region's the same. New starts popping up faster than usual for this time of year. Some of them are getting caught quick. A few aren't. Resources are starting to move around more than they have been.”

“Hotshot crews?” Trevor asks.

“Some. Smokejumpers too, from what I'm hearing.” Russ glances, briefly, almost incidentally, toward Beck and Reid. “Things are picking up.”

He doesn't say anything else about it.

I see Beck look at Reid. Reid looks back. Neither of them says a word, but something passes between them, the kind of understanding that doesn't require conversation. I feel my stomach drop a little even though nothing's actually happened yet.

“Heard the same thing from a couple guys on our jumper crew,” Reid says, mostly to Beck, like the rest of us aren't sitting right here. “Marcus said they sent two teams out yesterday.”

“Figured it was getting close to that,” Beck says.

“Sounds like things are finally picking up,” Reid says. There's an energy in his voice I recognize, the enthusiasm of someone hearing that the job he's trained for is about to matter again. Reid's not wishing for anything to burn. He's just a smokejumper who's spent weeks doing valuable, useful, decidedly non-smokejumper work, and some part of him has clearly been waiting for this.

I look at Beck.

Two months ago, I think he'd have looked like Reid does right now. He's serious about the job, always has been, and if his crew needs him, I know he'll go. But there's something else in his face too, something Reid's doesn't have. I know what it is because I've watched it build in Beck same as I've watched it build in myself. Blackpine stopped being a temporary assignment to him weeks ago. I'm not sure he's said that out loud, even to himself. But I can see it.

Russ doesn't say anything else about a recall. He doesn't predict it, doesn't tell Beck and Reid to expect anything in particular. He just moves the conversation along to the afternoon's work. Lunch wraps up, and we go back to clearing brush like nothing's changed.

Except something has, quietly, underneath everything else.

All afternoon, every time I catch sight of Beck working a few yards away, the same thought surfaces. He was going to leave eventually. I knew that from the beginning, understood it the way you understand any fact you've decided not to think about too closely. I just haven't been living like I knew it. Somewhere over the last two months, Beck stopped feeling temporary to me. His water bottle in the kitchen. His seat at the table. The way he finds my hand without looking for it. Sunday dinners with him beside me.

None of that felt temporary while it was happening. Now, suddenly, it does.

Back at the crew house in the evening, the heat finally starts to let up. Most of us end up outside, sitting on the porch steps or leaning against the railing, drinks in hand, the whole crew loose the way we are on a Thursday night with nothing scheduled.