Page 4 of Into the Fire

“Fence, mostly. Some tree work. Drove a truck for a while in Wyoming.” The words flowed out with ease. “Anything that wanted hands.”

I’d known that for three weeks, since the packet came through with his work history stapled to the back.

Hollis entered to grab the forecast. He took it out of the box by the door, read the new line at the bottom, and only then looked up.

“Hollis.”

“Dante.”

“Pack test goes out the front gate and up the county road. Bring water. The first mile’s steeper than it looks from here.”

Hollis had come to Silvertip two years after Dante had left. He knew about Carson Ridge from the details in the file: crew boss dead, survivor concussed, survivor said some strange things, survivor left. He shook Dante’s hand.

Hollis left with Shep behind him and still talking. In the doorway Hollis stopped and said, without turning around, “Don’t let him tell you what the liner cost. He’s been telling people two hundred since May.”

“What was it?”

“Ask him in a month. It’ll be one-fifty.”

It was now only Dante and me. I waited for him to make conversation, but he didn’t. He looked past me at the corkboard, and I watched him find the photo of Dutch. It was a crew shot from the Bitterroot. Dutch stood at the end of a row, squinting at whoever held the camera.

Dante didn’t move for a few seconds.

When he spoke, it wasn’t about the photo. He looked at the board instead, the rotation in my handwriting.

“Top of the board,” he said. “I’ll try not to get in your way.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I want my name back on that board, Boone.”

“Six o’clock. Out front.”

“You already said that.”

“Then you’ve heard it twice.”

Chapter two

Dante

The locker still had the dent.

Bottom corner, left side, from the summer Fellhauer tried to kill a wasp with a fire boot and got the locker instead. I put my thumb in the dent. The metal was cool and the shape exactly as I remembered it.

It was the first thing on the base that felt like mine.

Through the window, across the gravel, Boone was walking the rack line. He said something to a man on a ladder, in motion as the man answered. Base manager fit him. I’d known it would, back when it was Dutch’s title and Boone was just the man everyone leaned on.

It took four minutes to unpack. I had two pairs of boots, work clothes, a shaving kit, a jacket that was too light for Montana, a phone charger, and a paperback I’d been eighty pages into since Wyoming.

Most of what I owned was in the truck. One duffel, two boxes, and a milk crate of books I hadn’t read in three moves. The movies were mostly digital now. They moved inside my laptop. Nobody had to know how many romcoms I owned.

The rest I’d sold or left behind somewhere between Oregon and Idaho.

Some men would call that sad.

I called it traveling light.