Below the log deck the road goes back into the trees, and the trees are standing in fire.
Not the trees themselves. Not yet. It's the ground under them that's burning, the brush and the needles and the dead stuff of forty years, a low orange sea lying in among the trunks on both sides with the road a gray ribbon through it. Here and there a bush goes up all at once with a whump and stands burning like a man with his arms up. The trunks are black to head height and green above. The heat comes off it in a slow push.
Wes walks down the middle of the road in front of the bus with his flashlight.
He has to. The smoke sits on the road in a layer as high as the bus's headlights and the headlights make a white wall of it, so Dawn can see nothing but the wall. He can see the road under it. On his left the ground falls away toward Sawmill Creek, steep, and the edge isn't an edge, it's a softening, a place where the ash goes from road-gray to slope-gray, and a bus wheel would find it before an eye would.
"Left," he calls back. He walks backwards a few steps with the light on the dirt by her front tire. "Your left's soft. Come right. A little more. Hold it there."
The engine growls behind the smoke. The bus comes on at a walk.
A burning branch lies across the road. He kicks it, and it rolls, and sparks go up his leg. The heat is on his shins and his face. He pulls his collar up over his mouth and keeps walking, and the bus keeps coming, a big pale shape behind him with two lights for eyes, steady, doing what he tells it.
This part he can do. Twenty-six years of it.
It was a Thursday night in January, and he was at the shed.
He went out there some nights. He'd sit at his father's bench with the heater on and a beer, and then another one, and not do anything. Three beers in. The after-hours line rang through to the shed, because that's where the machine was. It rang, and he let it, and the machine clicked on with that sound like a throat clearing.
"Come right. Right. You're good."
The road bends. He walks the bend backwards with the light on the inside edge, where the ditch has burned out and left a trench of coals. The bus finds the bend. A tree on the slope above lets go of a limb, and the limb comes down through the branches in a shower of sparks and lands in the brush a bus length ahead and lies there burning. He goes around it and puts the light on it so she'll see it.
"Mr. Garrity? It's Eli Navarro, at the Larch Road place. The heater's got a smell and I've had this headache since—"
He picked up.
He doesn't know why he picked up. He's had seven months to know and he doesn't. He picked it up off the bench with his beer in the other hand and he said, "It's the altitude, kid. Crack a window and sleep it off."
And the boy said, "Yeah? Okay." And the boy said sorry for calling so late. And the boy asked about the snow, if Wes had been up on the hill yet this year, because the boy liked to talk, and Wes said not yet, and the boy said come up and he'd get him a free ride on the chairlift, and Wes said he might. That was the four minutes. The machine kept turning through all of it. It always did if you picked up late. You had to press stop, and he didn't.
"Left. Left. Hold it."
The smoke tears for a second and he can see the creek bottom below, a long way down, a black crease with orange in it. Then it closes.
Two nights later Rosa found him.
The inquest was in March. The heater had a fault in its flue collar, the inquest said, and the cabin's carbon monoxide alarm had no battery in it, and that was the landlord's, and it was all very sad and it was nobody's in particular. Wes sat at the back. He wasn't asked anything. There was nothing for anyone to ask. He went home and he didn't erase the tape. He meant to. He had his thumb on the button more than once, and the thumb wouldn't go down, and he put the machine back on the shelf. His father kept everything. In May he went into the mason's on Second Street with an envelope of twenties with nothing written on it and paid for a stone.
"Come on. Slow. You're good."
It was a bad Thursday, in April.
Ruth had been far away all afternoon. When he came in with the tea tray she looked up and called him Walter, and asked had he locked the car, and he said he had. Walter was twenty years dead. She'd been like that before and come back, and the girls on staff said leave her, she's happy where she is. So he sat with her by the window with the tea going cold. And because she was far away, and because she'd call him Walter and not remember him by morning, he told her. All of it. The shed, the beer, the boy's voice, what he said. He said it out loud for the first time to anybody, slowly, the way you'd say a thing at a grave.
She had her notebook on her knee. She always had her notebook on her knee. She wrote while he talked, hooks and loops, not looking at the page, and he watched her pencil go and thought nothing of it, because she wrote down the weather and the soup and what the girls said, she wrote down everything.
"Left. Hold it there."
The next week she asked him his name.
The fire stops.
It stops all at once, and on the far side of it the road goes on down through trees that are only trees, dark, smoking a little, waiting. He walks out of the heat into the cool and it's like walking out of a house. He stands there with the light hanging off his hand and the sweat going cold down his back. Then he turns and waves the bus on through, and steps up into it as it comes past him, and Dawn doesn't stop.
Rosa has moved down the bus to sit by Len, Doris's husband. Len is in his tie-down with his head back, humming, no words, and Rosa is in the seat beside the chair with his big hand in both of hers. Doris is asleep across the aisle with her mouth open. There's room next to Rosa, and Wes sits in it because his legs want him to.
She's wearing the jacket.
She's worn it all night. It's a ski-hill staff jacket, red and black, with the hill's name across the back in white letters, too big for her by three sizes, the sleeves rolled four times. There's a burn hole in the left cuff the size of a fingernail. She's got her thumb over it.
The boy wore it in the cabin kitchen the week before, the day Wes fitted the heater. He held the flashlight for him. He had it zipped to the chin because the cabin was cold, and he talked the whole time, about the hill and the snow and some girl, and he held the light exactly where Wes needed it without being told.
"He'd kill me," Rosa says. She's looking at the hole. "His good jacket."
Wes doesn't say anything.
"He saved two seasons for that cabin. So he could walk to the lift." She moves her thumb off the hole and looks at it and puts the thumb back. "You know what I keep thinking about? Somebody paid for his stone. Did you know that? I went in to the mason's to order it and the man said it's paid. Cash, in May. He wouldn't tell me who." She shakes her head. "Somebody in this town. Somebody just did it. I go and stand there and I think about that more than I think about him, some days. That somebody did that."
The bus rocks. Len hums.
"And I wanted to say." She turns to him. Her face is gray with ash and she's been crying at some point and stopped, and there are clean tracks. "I wanted to say this, in case. You know they're sending a man from the state Monday. About the heater."
"I heard."
"That's me. I made them. I got the phone company's records in July, and he called your night line, Wes. The first night he was sick. Four minutes, nine o'clock at night, to Garrity Propane." She says it without heat, as if she's told it to herself enough times to have worn the edges off. "And it went to a machine. Of course it did. Nine at night, who's there? Nobody's there. So that's what I told them. It's not you. It's a gas company that lets a machine take the calls at night. That's what I want them to look at. Not you. I wanted you to hear that from me before Monday."
He has the granola bar in his pocket. The one she put there on the Tamarack road. He finds it with his hand and holds it, through the cloth.
"Rosa," he says.
"Eat your bar." She pats his knee and turns back to Len. "You've had nothing all day."
He takes it out. He tears the wrapper. He holds the bar in his gloved hand and doesn't eat it.
One notebook a month. She buys them at the drugstore in packs of six and writes the month on the cover. They're in the canvas bag. All of them, this year's, all the months. He's seen her carry it down to lunch.
He looks up the bus.
Ruth is in the third row, door side, upright, with her hands folded on top of the bag and her eyes shut. Across the aisle from her Hal sits with his head back against the window. The inside lights are off to spare the battery, and Wes gets up with the bar still in his hand and goes up the aisle with his flashlight.
Hal's gone gray.
Not ash-gray. The other kind. His lips have a blue at the edges and his breath comes through the tube shallow and quick. His eyes are shut. His hands lie on his knees, open.
Wes crouches. He puts the light on the gauge.
The needle is down near the red, lower than it was at the log deck.
At the log deck the man in the cabin door held his hand up to him and pointed at the bus, and shouted the one word he could get across the rotors, and Wes saw it in the man's mouth: oxygen. They had a bottle aboard. They had room on the floor. Wes shook his head, and keyed the handset, and told the pilot the old man on oxygen wouldn't fly. The pilot said, copy, three. The pilot never said a word about oxygen.
The handset is on his chest. He knows the words. He's said them for twenty-six years. Command, Garrity, I've got a man on his last hour of oxygen, I need a medic and a bottle at the quarry gate. Bakke would find one. She'd find one if she had to send it down the county road in her own car.
He takes the cannula where it's slipped and puts it back behind Hal's ears, one side and then the other, with two fingers. He tucks the blanket in at the old man's knee.
He doesn't touch the handset.
He stands up. He goes back down the bus to Rosa and sits beside her, and she looks around at him.
"How's Hal?"
"Sleeping."
She turns back to Len. Wes sits a moment. Then he leans to her, close, so it's under Len's humming, a thing between the two of them.
"Rosa," he says. "She's been saying some hard things today. About people. Don't you take any of it home."
Rosa turns her head. "Ruth?"
"She's tired."
Rosa looks at him. Then up the bus, at the back of Ruth's white head in the third row. Then at him again, and her face goes soft, sorry for him, and she puts her hand on his arm.
"She's worse in the evenings, poor thing," she says. "Don't you mind her, Wes."
"I don't."
The bus is slowing. He feels it through the seat, the nose going down onto a long grade, and through the windshield the trees open out and there's the creek bottom: a flat of gravel and rock with the water somewhere in it, and the road running down onto a timber bridge.
He gets up and goes forward.
The bridge is long and low, plank decking on log stringers, with a rail on one side. The near end is dark. At the far end, the bank where the road climbs out, the brush is burning, and the fire has got down into the bridge, under the planks. He can see it between the gaps, a red glow coming up through the deck in stripes, and smoke lifting off the far end in a slow sheet.
Dawn stops the bus at the top of the approach. She sits with her hands on the wheel.
"Wes," she says.
"I see it."
He's beside the third row. Ruth's eyes are shut. Her hands are folded on the seat in front of her now, on its back rail, and the canvas bag is on the seat beside her, between her and the aisle, with its flap down and the corners of the notebooks showing.
It's by his knee. He doesn't have to reach for it at all.