Page 16 of Into the Fire

“You asked me if I was sure.”

That was it—such a small thing. He hadn’t called me a liar. The investigators didn’t call me a liar either. They nodded, wrote it down, and thanked me. Then I sat on a cot in the infirmary with my head split open, trying to hold six unconnected pieces together. Then I told the one man I’d have bet everything on. Boone Hatcher looked at me, kind and careful, and asked whether I was sure the concussion wasn’t part of it.

I’d been asking myself the same question for eleven hours by then. I needed one person in the world to be more confident in my story than I was.

“You want to know what a concussion is like?” I asked. “It’s like somebody dropped the box with everything in it, and you’re picking pieces up off the floor while people watch. The pieces don’t fit, but you know they should because you were there when they did fit. Then somebody I trusted looked at what was in my hands and asked if I was sure the box was real.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“That is what I heard.”

“I’ve known that’s what you heard.” His voice was louder. “I’ve known it for five years, and I’d give a lot to have asked a different question, but I never got the chance because the next thing I knew, you were gone.”

The gravel crunched under his boots as he shifted his weight.

“You left,” he said.

“There was nothing left for me here.”

“I was here.”

“You didn’t stop me,” I said.

“You never gave me the chance.” He lowered his voice. “You want to lay everything out the way you remember it, go ahead, but I was there for it too. We’d buried Dutch two weeks before. The crew was coming apart: Coyle wasn’t speaking, Mendoza was in Missoula getting pins put in, and Fellhauer was drinking at the gate by four in the afternoon. Regional insisted on having somebody sign forms about all of it. That’s when you started packing. You didn’t fight or yell at me, and you didn’t give me a single door I could walk through to fix it. You decided one bad question in the infirmary was the only thing I said that mattered, and by the time I understood you were actually leaving, you were already driving down the county road.”

“You could have followed it.”

“To where? You didn’t leave an address, Dante. You left a resignation on Marty’s desk. I spent the winter working the phones to find out what state you were in.”

I hadn’t known that.

“You doubted me,” I said.

“You ran.”

Neither of us moved.

“I’m sorry for how I asked,” Boone said finally. “For asking that way, that night, when what you needed was—” He stopped himself short of naming it. “I’ve been sorry for a long time.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye.”

“That’s not what you did wrong.”

“It’s the part I’m sorry for.”

The apologies were both real, but they were five years too late to be useful.

Boone straightened. “You’re still done for today,” he said.

I nearly laughed.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Probably.” He picked up the drill log Shep had abandoned. “O eight hundred tomorrow. Eat before you come.”

Dutch used to end it that way. Run a man into the ground, then feed him. I’d watched him do it to Boone a dozen times.

He walked toward Operations and didn’t look back. I stood in the empty pit, hating one thing. He was right about the drill. My forearms were done. I’d have hurt myself on the next letdown.