Torch

by Roxie Noir

  I grin, looking down at her.

  “If I were a nice guy who didn’t challenge you sometimes you’d get bored and eat me alive,” I say.

  She taps her fingers on my chest, like she’s thinking.

  “I like nice guys,” she says after a while, though she doesn’t sound like she believes it.

  “I’m nice,” I say. “I was real nice earlier.”

  She laughs, then snuggles against me a little more. We both look out the window, at the horizon. I’m starting to doze off when she speaks.

  “That’s Saturn again,” she says, pointing.

  I follow her finger, remembering the directions from the other night: Mars, over to Antares, up to Saturn.

  “Can you see the rings with binoculars?” I ask.

  “You could barely see them with a big-ass telescope,” she says.

  Right.

  “You know what planet I can see right now with the naked eye?” I ask.

  Clementine looks at me again.

  “If you say Uranus I swear I’m leaving and hiking nine miles back to civilization right now,” she says, but there’s laughter in her voice.

  “I was gonna say Mars,” I say, pretending to be offended. “I’m not thirteen.”

  I was absolutely going to say Uranus. It’s always funny.

  “Sure,” she says, putting her head back.

  There’s another silence, and I look at the stars hovering near the horizon.

  “This is different,” she says.

  “It is?” I ask.

  It doesn’t really feel different. It feels like we could be in the back of my pickup truck, or in her basement, or in my bedroom after my parents went to sleep and she sneaked over.

  “No one’s gonna catch us,” she says. “And if they do, it doesn’t matter.”

  I’ve started playing with her hair without noticing what I was doing, the slippery dark strands coiling through my fingers.

  “Does that make it less exciting?” I ask. “Are you saying you miss the thrill?”

  She laughs.

  “The thrill of nearly getting busted by the cops that one time?” she says. “Or of Mrs. Hudgins finding us on what was technically her property and reaming us out?”

  “Did she have a shotgun, or did I make that up?” I ask.

  “I think it was a BB gun,” Clementine says.

  “I’d rather her shoot me than tell my parents,” I say. “A couple years ago, I sort of let it slip that I wasn’t exactly saving myself anymore, and I don’t think my mom’s forgiven me yet.”

  “But you live with them?”

  “I stay in the guest house for half the year,” I correct her. “And I don’t... entertain guests there.”

  In high school, Clementine and I were in a slightly weird situation. I heard plenty of stories about dads in Ashlake, Montana answering the door holding a shotgun, threatening boyfriends who’d dare to touch their daughters.

  But Clementine’s parents were relatively cool. I mean, they weren’t nearly as permissive as we’d have liked, but they never threatened me with a shotgun. It was my parents who were the strict ones, who were vigorously opposed to us ever being alone together, lest we be tempted by sin.

  It didn’t work. Not by a long shot. Sin won, hard. And fast. And deep. And as often as we could possibly manage.

  “This is nice, though,” she murmurs.

  “Yeah, it is,” I agree.

  In a few more minutes, she’s asleep on me. I’m tired as hell, but there’s no way I can fall asleep sharing this two-foot-wide cot with her, so I stay awake for a little while. I listen to her breathing. I slide my fingers through her hair.

  I think that maybe, maybe, this time will work out differently.

  After a while I’m beyond sleepy and also beyond uncomfortable, so I gently get out from under Clementine, then climb gingerly over her until I’m off the cot.

  She wakes up when I try to roll her onto her sleeping bag.

  “You leaving?” she asks, barely awake.

  “I’m leaving to there,” I say, pointing at the other cot.

  She closes her eyes again, snuggling into her sleeping bag.

  “Fine,” she says, and then she’s asleep again.

  I have a feeling she won’t remember this conversation in the morning. I get into my own sleeping bag, in the cot perpendicular to hers.

  I’m asleep in seconds.

  I wake up to the sun slicing through the windows, the hard yellow rays hitting the ceiling of the lookout and illuminating everything inside. It takes me a minute to remember where I am, but I wake up in strange places a lot. Usually a strange tent, sometimes a strange motel, sometimes a strange bunkhouse.

  I’ve never woken up in a strange fire lookout before, though given my job, it’s weird that I haven’t.

  Then I think the same thing I always think.

  Is something on fire?

  No.

  It used to be am I in a red zone, but two years of firefighting has at least changed that habit, even though I still wake up the same way: instantly, and all at once.

  I stretch and look at the cot perpendicular to mine, but Clementine isn’t in it.

  “There you are,” she says.

  I look down. She’s sitting, cross-legged, on a big wooden trunk, binoculars in her hands. All she’s wearing is a shirt and underpants, though I’m not really sure why she’s even wearing that.

  “You need those to watch me sleep?” I ask, my voice still rough.

  “Yeah, I really enjoy examining your individual pores,” she teases.

  I lay back, hands behind my head. I kicked my sleeping bag mostly off during the night, because they’re usually too warm, but it’s still strategically covering my junk.

  “Good, because I’m on the cover of the Hot Firemen Pores 2017 calendar,” I say.

  “Hunter, wake up before you try to make jokes,” Clementine says.

  She checks me out anyway, and I just enjoy it. I get checked out a lot, and though I don’t usually mind that much, I like it when she’s the one doing it.

  “You want me to move the bag?” I ask, still sounding blurry.

  She glances down at my morning wood tenting up the sleeping bag, as if she hadn’t already noticed.

  “Actually, I want you to look at that white column,” she says, and leans toward me, handing over the binoculars.

  It’s less exciting than showing her my dick, but it is why we’re here, so I take the binoculars and look at the white column. It’s the same one she showed me yesterday, but this morning it looks a little bigger, and it’s definitely rising upward.

  “It’s smoke,” I say, half a second later.

  “I thought so,” she says.

  I keep looking at it, and a knot tightens in my stomach. It’s not big. The smoke’s not billowing upward, like it would if this were a serious fire, but something about it looks like it might be worse than just a lightning strike.

  But it is definitely, absolutely a column of smoke. Clouds don’t have that slightly tan tinge to them that smoke from burning wood does.

  I take the binoculars down, and Clementine is still looking at me, though now she’s not checking me out. Now she looks a little worried.

  “Can you tell if it’s just a lightning strike?” she asks.

  “Not from here,” I say.

  “I’m gonna put on pants and radio it in,” she says, hopping off the crate.

  I turn and watch her walk across the lookout, blatantly checking out her ass.

  “Why would you put on pants?” I ask. “They can’t see you.”

  “I’ll know,” she says, laughing. “I don’t want to talk to my boss without pants on. It’s weird.”

  My boss has seen me naked more than once, but when you camp with two dozen guys for half the year, privacy is one of the first things to go.

  “Suit yourself,” I say, and finally get out of bed.

  17

  Clementine

  I put my pan
ts on. I know perfectly well that Mike and Jennifer, or whoever’s manning the radio this morning can’t see me, but it feels unprofessional to call in a forest fire with nothing on but underwear.

  Hunter gets up and starts making instant coffee still buck-ass naked, standing in front of the propane stove with his arms crossed while he waits for the water to boil.

  “You want some?” he asks.

  I just hold up the mug I made while he was still asleep, and he nods. I take a sip and walk to the Osborne Firefinder. It’s a circular, spinning map in the center of the lookout, mounted on a chest-height table. I haven’t used one in a couple of years, since I first did my fire lookout training, and I frown at it.

  “You’re on your own with that thing,” Hunter says.

  “Shouldn’t you be better at this than me?” I ask, spinning it. It’s got a vertical column with a narrow sight mounted on both sides of the circle, and I squint through them, lining up the column of smoke in the crosshairs.

  “I don’t find fires,” he says.

  “Yeah, I know, you put fires out,” I finish for him.

  Even if I’m not using it quite right, it looks like the fire is over in the direction of the Spires, a series of sharp granite peaks a good twenty miles off. The Spires themselves are impossible to scale unless you’re an advanced rock climber, but they’re also nearly impossible to get to, in the middle of a maze of steep mountains and sharp canyons.

  I’ve never even been to the foot of the Spires. There’s one trail in, and it’s steep, rocky, treacherous, and the first fifteen miles of it doesn’t have a single place where you could possibly camp. More than one person has died, falling off a ledge or something, after getting stuck on Spinside Trail after dark.

  “You figure out where it is?” Hunter asks, coming up behind me. He blows on his coffee in one hand, peeking over my shoulder, his other hand casually on my hip.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “But it might be in the Spires. It’s at least in that direction.”

  We both look at the map for a moment, Hunter studying it over my shoulder.

  “You ever been there?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “You?”

  “I took the trail in once,” he says. “When I got back from the Marines, my parents suggested I join this local veterans’ support group that did a lot of wilderness shit since it was supposed to help us center ourselves and readjust to society.”

  He takes a sip.

  “Though they never really discussed how being with a couple of other guys in the middle of nowhere for a week was supposed to help me readjust to regular life,” he says dryly.

  “Spineside Trail,” I say, trying to steer him back on track.

  He’s stroking my hip with one thumb, distractedly. I don’t think he knows he’s doing it, but it feels so familiar and tender that I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else, because this is what I want it to be like with us.

  I went eight years without admitting it even to myself, but the good stuff was really good. Even though we were dumb teenagers. It took me years to realize how rare that is.

  “We hiked in, and I climbed the first three routes, but after that it got way too advanced,” he says, and laughs. “Not even a whole bunch of guys watching me could get me to climb a sheer cliff wall two hundred feet off the ground.”

  “Did anyone climb it?” I ask.

  Hunter shakes his head.

  “Me and another guy were the only ones who did the second route,” he says like he’s bragging.

  It’s working. I’m impressed. I’ve seen photos of the routes in the Spires, and they’re no fucking joke.

  “Let me guess,” I say, teasing him. “You didn’t really want to do that second climb, but you couldn’t let some other guy do one more climb than you did.”

  Hunter grins, then kisses me.

  “It’s like you already know me,” he says.

  I call in the column of smoke. Mike is the one who answers the radio, and he runs through a detailed series of questions. I can hear him typing on the other end. He’s probably filling out a report, and as we keep going, he sounds more and more worried.

  “I think it might be in the Spires,” I say, leaning against the fire finder and looking out toward the thin column of smoke.

  “Well, that does lead me to my next question,” he says. “How are you at using that spinning contraption?”

  I spin it.

  “I could use a refresher,” I say.

  Mike sighs.

  “I was afraid of that,” he says. “I’m not gonna lie, it’s been years since I used one of those things, Clementine. If you can hold on, I’ll go get Randy.”

  The radio goes silent. Hunter looks at me, sitting in a chair at the tiny table, eating instant oatmeal from a mug.

  “Getting Randy sounds like some serious shit,” he says.

  “Randy is basically the Gandalf of the Copper Creek Ranger Division,” I explain.

  Hunter raises one eyebrow.

  “You know, the wise old wizard who’s been around so long that he can show demons what’s what?” I say.

  Hunter just kind of shrugs.

  “From Lord of the Rings,” I go on, even though I know it’s pointless.

  He just shakes his head. I’m starting to get incredulous.

  “Did you not even see the movies?” I ask. “Didn’t you ever watch them at my house?”

  “If we did I was probably too busy trying to cop a feel to pay attention,” he says.

  He has a point there, actually.

  “You seriously don’t know Gandalf, though?” I ask.

  Hunter shrugs, a wicked gleam in his eye as he scrapes oatmeal out of his mug.

  “I don’t know your nerd shit,” he says, barely able to keep himself from smiling.

  I roll my eyes, even though I’m smiling too, because I know he’s just winding me up.

  “Lord of the Rings is not nerd shit anymore,” I say. “The movies were huge hits, and the books have really informed all fantasy—”

  The radio crackles, cutting me off.

  “Spruce Mountain Lookout, come in,” a gnarled voice says. It sounds like an ent.

  Not that Hunter would know what that is, but he’s laughing at me from the kitchen table.

  “This is Spruce Mountain, over,” I say.

  “You got the firefinder in front of you?” Randy asks.

  “Roger.”

  “Okay then. What you wanna do first is make sure that you’re facing the fire. Make sure you don’t lock your knees, since you’re at altitude, that can be dangerous. Get real lightheaded. I knew this guy one time, Brian I think his name was, and he locked his knees trying to locate a fire and smacked his head real good when he fainted...”

  “Does Gandalf tell a lot of people not to lock their knees?” Hunter whispers at me.

  I flip him off and keep listening to Randy.

  Randy is a very, very patient man, and as I listen to a long digression about how they just don’t make rubber gaskets like they used to, I do my best to be as patient as him.

  Hunter, on the other hand, couldn’t take listening to Randy for this long. He went down from the lookout tower to explore around a little, though I don’t think there’s much to explore besides the outhouse and some rocks.

  He’s always been a little twitchy, though. Not the kind of person who can sit still for more than a couple minutes, which is why an exciting job with plenty of physical labor suits him. I can’t imagine Hunter in an office, wearing a suit or something, calmly meeting with clients or whatever people with office jobs do.

  I’m looking through both sights of the firefinder at the column of smoke, following Randy’s instructions for the second time. He wanted to double-check my numbers, and I don’t blame him.

  “All right, that ought to do ‘er,” he says. “Read me the damage.”

  By the damage he means the heading you calculated for the fire. I rattle off coordinates into th
e radio.

  There’s a brief pause.

  “They’re a degree off from each other, but that’s to be expected,” he says. I can hear him tapping a pencil against a piece of paper, probably on a desk. “Congratulations, Clementine, you’ve found a lightning strike in the Spires.”

  “Thanks?” I say.

  I walk to the windows facing the smoke. It hasn’t changed at all in the past couple of hours, ever since I woke up, so I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do about it.

  Randy laughs into the radio, a dry sound.

  “Mike had to go to a meeting, but he left me in charge of you for the time being,” he says, and I can hear the sound of a chair creaking, like Randy’s leaning back and putting his feet on the desk.

  “I know how much you like being in charge,” I say.

  Randy just sighs, because he hates being responsible for other people.

  “How do you feel about staying at that lookout another night or so?” he asks.

  I spot Hunter down below, climbing a stack of boulders. He’s got his shirt off, and even though he’s far away, I can see his back muscles rippling and bulging in the sunlight.

  “I can do that,” I say, hoping my voice sounds normal.

  “In all likelihood, that fire’s gonna burn itself out and it won’t be a problem,” he says. “Besides, that area hasn’t burned in a good fifty years, so it needs to be cleared out. This’ll save us having to send in a crew to do a controlled burn, which they never want to do in the Spires, because yowza, that hike.”

  That’s the tricky thing about forest fires: as far as nature is concerned, they’re not actually bad. The wildlands of the western United States are supposed to catch fire every so often, because that’s how they evolved. Most of the adult trees are more than hardy enough to survive a fire, and they help clear away the underbrush, keeping the forest from getting too choked with bushes and weeds.

  Basically, occasional fires from lightning strikes are part of the ecosystem. But then humans came along and fucked it up, by building houses in fire-prone places, and also by starting way, way more fires than there are supposed to be.

  Right now, about ten percent of wildfires are started by lightning. Those are the fires that the ecosystem can handle. The other ninety percent are people leaving campfires burning, or shooting off fireworks, or dropping cigarettes, or just doing dumb, dangerous shit.