Page 38 of Into the Fire

Boone took it down and held it against the window light.

The seal was unbroken.

“He never opened it,” Boone said.

“You knew about this?”

“He showed it to me once.”

“What was he saving it for?”

Boone looked at the bottle. “Never said.”

He didn’t pour right away. He read the label like it might have instructions on it.

“He lost his vote,” I said. “Five years of nothing. The bottle’s ours now.”

Boone pulled down two glasses. One was an actual shot glass. The other was a jelly jar. He looked at both, gave me the glass, and poured without asking. He’d shoved his sleeves up somewhere between the windows and the kettle, and I looked at his forearms while he poured.

We stood in the middle of the cabin, and Boone toasted.

“To Dutch.”

“Dutch,” I said.

It was good whiskey and so much better than anything else in the cabin.

“Day before the jump,” I said. “He spent his whole lunch fixing the screen door on the ready room. It was a spring. He wouldn’t let anybody help and wouldn’t eat until he could sit down. He kept saying the door had been talking to him for a month. That’s the last full day I’ve got of him, and what I remember is the door.”

“I remember the manifest,” Boone said. “He filled it out that night, and his pen died halfway. He wrote the rest in pencil. I signed it the next morning and gave him a hard time about it.”

Boone sipped again. “Did I ever tell you about his shoulder?”

“Which shoulder?”

“No, then. The spring before you joined us, he tore something in the left one on a practice jump. I watched him favor it for two weeks. I told him if he couldn’t raise his arm over his head he had no business in the door, and he told me to mind my rank.”

“What’d you do?”

“Told him again in front of Nash.” Boone swallowed. “He grounded himself the next morning and called it a scheduling decision. He loaded all the paperwork on me for the next month.”

“He punished you for being right.”

“Thoroughly.” Boone looked at the bottle. “I forgot about that. I forgot that I ever thought he was wrong about anything.”

I had my own story. “He got us lost coming off the Sula fire. He had refused to turn the GPS on and said it was for people who couldn’t read the country. Then he marched four of us down the wrong draw for an hour and blamed the county for where they’d put the road.”

“The county.”

“They’d put it in the wrong place, Boone. He was very clear about that.”

Boone laughed low and poured a second short measure into each glass before corking the bottle. I drank the second shot more slowly than the first. “He knew about us,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“He never said anything.”

“He told me once. We were at the racks, and you were rechecking something Nash had already checked. Dutch said, ‘A man checks a thing twice because he cares about the thing.’ At first, I thought he meant the gear.”

Boone was quiet for a second. “Year before that, he told me you flirted with everybody. I said I’d noticed. Then, about a season later, out of nowhere, in the middle of a weather briefing, he leaned over and said, ‘Not everybody anymore.’”