Lookout

Dani was already at the trailhead when I came around the last switchback of the road, pack on the ground, rolling her right shoulder like it owed her money. The agency truck was gone. Six miles of granite and dust waited above us, and she grinned when she saw me.

“Ruth. They said you’d be early. I’m Dani.” She stuck out her left hand. I took it. Her grip was warm and gone before I had a chance to decide I minded.

“You’re on time,” I said.

“That’s a compliment from you. I can tell.” She hauled the pack up with her left arm and settled the strap off the bad shoulder. “Hit a snag on a line three seasons back. It talks to me on the uphill. Don’t wait if I get slow.”

“I don’t wait.”

She laughed and started walking anyway, and then she talked. About the snag, and the way the trail cut too close to a loose face, and the radio operator with the deep voice who had checked her in at the station. “You know the one. Sounds like he should be selling something. He called this ridge ‘scenic.’ I told him scenic was for people who didn’t have to carry their water.”

I made a sound that might have been agreement. She took it and ran.

“You do the morning check-in at seven, right? He’ll be on. Don’t let him get poetic. I already told him if he says scenic again I’ll key the mic and leave it.”

The trail narrowed. Lodgepole closed in, then opened onto a bare rib of rock where the wind took the sweat off my neck. Dani kept pace even when she favored the shoulder. She pointed out a false summit, a spring that was only a wet seam in the stone, a place the map lied. I answered when I had to. Yes. No. The spring is farther. By the time the tower showed, a glass box on stilts against a hard blue sky, I had said more words than I had in a month, and most of them were no.

She stopped under the catwalk and looked up. “All right. That’s a room.”

“It’s the whole house.”

Inside, the fire finder sat on its pedestal in the middle of the floor, brass ring catching the noon glare. One cot against the north glass. One pad rolled under it. The lightning stool stood by the finder with its glass feet, useless and required. I put the kettle on the little stove and showed her the radio log while the water heated.

“Morning check-in, weather, visibility, any smokes. You read the azimuth off the finder, write it, then the distance if you can get one. Cross-shots if dispatch asks.” I tapped the column. “Don’t pretty it up. They want numbers.”

“I can do numbers.” She took the stool at the finder, sighted along the ridge to the west, and called the bearing before I had the book open. She did the next one faster. A third, on a scar I had watched all summer, came out exact.

I checked it on the ring. Exact.

“You’re quick,” I said.

“I spent years looking at country I was about to walk into. You learn not to guess.” She rolled the shoulder once, careful, and grinned at the glass. “Don’t look so betrayed. I’m only here three days.”

“I’m not betrayed.”

“You’re annoyed. Then you’ll be impressed. Then you’ll be annoyed that you’re impressed. I’ve seen that face on crew bosses.”

I poured the coffee so I wouldn’t have to answer that. It was too strong, the way I liked it. She drank it black and didn’t flinch. Through the afternoon she worked the finder while I took the radio, and then we switched, and she was still faster. A haze sat in the far drainage. She called the azimuth, the probable distance, the color of the column before I had finished writing the time. I was annoyed. Then the column was a campfire exactly where she had put it. I was impressed, and then I was annoyed at that, which was worse.

At dusk she took the cot without asking and left me the pad, which was correct and still felt like a loss of ground. “Shoulder likes a real edge,” she said. “If it bothers you, say so. I can do the floor.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Good night, Ruth.”

I lay under the north window and listened to her breathe and did not sleep for a long time.

The second night the sky went white.

I was at the log when the first strike hit the far ridge, a crack so close the glass hummed. Static climbed the radio. The book was plain about this: off the cot, off the metal, onto the stool with the glass feet, everything conductive away from you, and you stayed there until it passed. I was already moving when the next one lit the whole range, every drainage carved out in blue-white.

“Stool,” I said.

Dani was up, barefoot, the shoulder held close to her body. We both got onto the little platform. It was built for one person being struck, not two people trying not to fall off. The glass feet skated a fraction on the boards. She caught my wrist. I caught the back of her arm, high, where the muscle was tight and careful.

“Don’t lean,” I said.

“I’m not leaning. The mountain is.”

Another strike, closer. The room flashed and went dark except for the afterimage of the ridges. Her hand stayed on my wrist. Mine stayed on her arm. We stood hip to hip in the middle of all that glass while the storm walked the summit, and there was nowhere else to be.

When the gaps between strikes got long enough to talk, she said, “Why do you come up here alone every year?”

The wind pushed at the catwalk. I could have said the job. I could have said the pay, or the quiet, or that someone had to. None of those were the truth, and the truth came out before I decided to spend it.

“I came up to stop wanting things,” I said. “It was working.”

She didn’t joke. Her thumb rested once against the inside of my wrist. “Was.”

“Don’t.”

“All right.”

The last of the storm dragged east. The ridges came back in ordinary dark. Rain ticked the glass and then quit. We should have stepped down. She didn’t let go of my hand.

I don’t know which of us moved. Afterward I couldn’t sort it. Her mouth was there, or mine was, and then we were kissing, careful at first because of the stool and the drop of the room around it, and then not careful. She tasted like the cocoa she’d made before the sky broke. My hand went to her face. Hers went into my hair, then down to my wrist again, holding on the way she had during the strikes. I kissed her back. I wanted to. I had not wanted anyone inside this tower in eleven summers, and the wanting was simple and immediate and ruined the point of the place.

Her bad shoulder bumped my chest when we shifted. She made a small sound and I eased off, and she followed, mouth at the corner of mine, her fingers laced with mine so neither of us could pretend it was balance anymore.

We got down off the stool without letting go. The cot edge caught the back of my leg. We didn’t lie down. We stood in the gray that comes before any real light, her forehead against mine, both of us breathing like the climb. I touched her hair where it had come loose. She turned her face into my palm and kissed the heel of my hand, then my mouth again, slower.

“Ruth,” she said.

The radio crackled.

Dispatch, the deep voice, cheerful and early, calling the tower for the morning check-in. The log was on the table. The finder sat between us and the set, ring cold in the gray light. Neither of us reached for the mic. Her hand was still in mine. The voice asked again, patient, scenic probably waiting in his throat, and the tower stayed quiet while the range took on color, and I did not know yet whether I was going to answer.