Last Encampment

I still don't know how Hailey talked me into this, and I was there for the whole conversation, which makes it worse somehow. She showed up at my flat on a Thursday with two bags of bhel puri and that look she gets, the one where she has already decided and is just waiting for me to catch up, and she said the Satpura Trappers' Encampment was holding its last reunion at the Kanha County Fairgrounds and that I was coming whether I liked it or not.

"I'm a parking ticket adjudicator, Hailey," I told her, because apparently I thought my job title was a personality. "I spend my days deciding whether people's excuses for parking in front of a fire hydrant hold up. What could I possibly have in common with trappers?"

"Nothing, and that's exactly my point," she said, dropping onto my couch and stealing the good cushion, the one that doesn't have a spring poking through. "You haven't taken a weekend off in two years. You alphabetize your spice rack. You need this."

I could claim I fought harder, but the truth is I said yes before the bhel puri was half gone. I'm forty-three years old, I've spent eighteen years building a life so orderly that even my dentist complimented my flossing schedule, and one bag of street food later I had agreed to spend a weekend at a fairground with a bunch of retired wilderness men who probably smelled like woodsmoke and regret.

What Hailey didn't tell me, and I've decided this was deliberate, was who was running the reunion. I found out the way you find out worst things, which is too late and in public.

I knew the name, of course. Ross Webber. I dated him for six months when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-five, back when I still thought love was something you could schedule around. He was a young trapper then, all forearms and grand plans, and I was a junior clerk who believed a man could be talked into staying put if you were patient enough. Then a five-year wilderness contract came along, up in the buffer zone, and he took it after one long night of "thinking about it" at my kitchen table, and then the only thing he asked me was whether I could forward his mail. That was the end of it. Amicably, he'd probably say. I'd say a woman doesn't spend two decades keeping a little filing cabinet of grudges over nothing.

The drive out to the fairgrounds was long and dusty and Hailey talked the entire way about her pottery stall, about the glazes she was testing, about a man at the market who bought three mugs and then asked if she could make them all slightly wrong on purpose. I answered maybe a quarter of what she said. The rest of me was doing arithmetic I didn't want to do, like whether twenty years was long enough for a grudge to mellow into something less embarrassing. It wasn't. I knew it wasn't, because my stomach was doing a slow roll every time we passed a sign for the fair.

The Kanha County Fairgrounds are a strange place now, half living and half given back to the teak forest that keeps creeping in from the edges. The main gate still stands, and the food stalls still run on weekends, but the back half of the grounds has gone soft and green, saplings coming up through cracks in old paving, and nobody has the money or the heart to push the forest back out. Hailey parked near the food stalls and I followed her past the bunting and the smell of frying something, deeper into the grounds, toward the disused nodule field stage.

That stage is a local oddity. It's a big raised concrete platform built back when they used to haul mining equipment in and demonstrate rock crushers and drilling rigs to crowds of farmers and buyers. The mining never really went anywhere, the demonstrations stopped, and the platform just stayed there, this enormous gray slab in the middle of the scrub with half-collapsed tarp tents around it like the aftermath of a very tidy disaster. That's where the trappers had set up. Camp stoves, canvas chairs, a few actual canvas wall tents that looked older than most of the men sitting in front of them.

There were maybe twenty people there, mostly men in their fifties and sixties, a few wives, a couple of dogs that had clearly decided the whole gathering was theirs. And near the center, standing at a folding table doing something administrative, because of course he was, was Ross Webber.

Twenty years had done him no harm, which annoyed me immediately. He was forty-five now, broader through the shoulders than he'd been at twenty-five, gray coming into his beard, wearing a canvas jacket that had earned its living. He was writing something on a clipboard and talking to an older man I didn't recognize, and he laughed at something the man said, and I stood there at the edge of the tarp tents feeling like I'd walked into a wall made entirely of memory.

Hailey, I should note, was watching me and not the trappers. She knows the whole history. She was the one who fed me dinner the week it ended, back when we were both young enough to think heartbreak was a permanent condition.

"That's him, isn't it," she said, not really asking.

"That's him."

"Well. Come on then."

"Absolutely not. I came, I saw the tent situation, the forest is beautiful, let's go look at the pottery stalls." I turned around, and I want it noted that I got three whole steps before she caught my elbow.

"Meagan Blake, you did not drive an hour in my car with your spice-rack life left at home just to turn around now. He'll see you eventually anyway. Better on your terms."

So she towed me in, past a stove burning something aromatic, past a woman selling carved walking sticks, right up to the folding table, and Ross looked up from his clipboard and his face did something complicated before it settled into a smile that had edges on it.

"Well," he said, putting the pen down with great care. "Meagan Blake. Did you come to issue me a citation?"

"Depends," I heard myself say, before any part of my brain with brakes got involved. "Is there a fine for poor planning? Because the paperwork on this reunion looks about twenty years overdue."

Beside me Hailey made a small sound, the kind a person makes when they'd like to be somewhere else, possibly another state. The older man Ross had been talking to glanced between us and, wisely, found something to look at near the walking sticks.

Ross, to his credit or his discredit, laughed. "You haven't changed."

"You have. You got old."

"I did. It happens to everyone who doesn't die of ambition." He came around the table, and I noticed he kept his hands where I could see them, which was either politeness or a joke left over from a version of us that no longer existed. "There's tea on the second stove. Bryan Hart brought his own kettle, so it's even drinkable. You remember Bryan."

Bryan Hart turned out to be a retired forest ranger with a white mustache and a handshake like a vise, and he said hello to me like I was a normal person and not a woman excavating an old grievance in public, and for that I was grateful. Hailey went off with him to look at the trap displays, which left me standing at the table with Ross and a paper cup of tea I did not want.

We talked for ten minutes, and it went the way those talks go, all surface and subtext. He asked if I still lived in the district. I said yes, and that I adjudicated parking tickets, and he said that sounded peaceful, and I said it was, and the whole time we were both talking about something else entirely, some twenty-year-old argument neither of us wanted to have in front of the walking stick lady.

I did try to leave after that. Genuinely. I found Hailey and told her I'd seen the tents and the traps and the men, that my cultural education was complete, and that I'd be at her stall or in the car, my choice pending. She said, "One more thing," which is Hailey's most dangerous sentence, and towed me toward the back of the grounds where the fair's oddities live.

There's a row of half-derelict exhibit sheds back there, the kind that used to hold prize vegetables and 4-H projects and now mostly hold weather. Hailey wanted to see if one of them still had the old fair signage, because she collects that sort of thing for inspiration, and I trailed along because the alternative was standing alone with my tea and my feelings.

The third shed down had its door off its hinges, and inside, on a shelf that sagged in the middle, somebody had left decades of fair junk. Ribbons gone the color of weak tea. A rusted folding sign. And under a collapsed stack of burlap, half hidden, a net needle, the old wooden kind trappers used for mending, with half a spindle still jammed in its eye, the cord stiff and gray with age.

I picked it up without thinking. The wood had gone smooth the way old tools do, worn by hands, and I stood there in the dust and the wasp-nest quiet thinking about a man at twenty-five who mended nets by lamplight while I read on the other side of the tent, and how neither of us had ever once said the obvious thing, that we wanted different maps, until it was too late to say it kindly.

"You've gone quiet," Hailey said from the doorway. "That's either very good or very bad."

I slid the needle into my bag, meaning to ask someone about it and knowing I wouldn't. "It's nothing. Let's go back before the tea gets cold."

The tea had been cold for twenty minutes, and we both knew it.

The light was going long and gold by the time we came back around to the stage, and most of the old trappers had drifted toward the food stalls, but Ross was standing at the edge of the concrete platform, looking out at the saplings pushing through the old paving like he was taking attendance. I meant to walk past. I want that noted only in the sense that my feet had their own plan and I followed them anyway.

"Ticket queen," he said, without turning around. "Eighteen years of ruining people's afternoons over wheel angles. How's that treating you?"

"It pays for my spice rack," I said, climbing up onto the platform beside him. "Which is alphabetized, by the way. Paprika comes before turmeric. I know that's a lot of information for a man who lives in a tent."

"Tents have an order to them," he said, turning, and there was that edge in his smile again. "Guy lines, gear lines, food hung high. You'd hate it. Too much structure."

"I would love it. That's the problem with you, Ross. You think I'm some brittle little paper-pusher who'd cry without her desk, and I've been thinking about it, and I think you invented that Meagan so you'd have a reason to leave."

He stepped closer, which was either an argument or a mistake, and I shoved him in the chest with both hands before my brain filed the appropriate permits. He grabbed my wrists, I twisted, and for about six seconds we were forty-three and forty-five years old wrestling on a concrete stage like a couple of fools, and then my heel skidded on a slick patch of old demonstration grease and we both went down in a heap, him half under me, both of us wheezing with laughter that had no dignity in it at all.

"Get off me," he said, not meaning it.

"You got old and slow," I said, not moving either.

Bryan Hart's voice came from below the stage, dry as his kettle. "Twenty years and they're still at it. Some things the forest can't reclaim."

* * *

The roasting started around the fire they'd built in a metal drum near the tents, once the tea was replaced with something stronger from a flask that made its way around the circle. There were about twenty of us left by then, mostly men with gray in their beards and a couple of wives who'd heard every story twice, and one of the older men, a leathery fellow I never did catch the name of, pointed his cup at Ross and cleared his throat.

"Tell them about the one that got away, Webber. The one you chose a jungle over."

"Careful," Ross said, but he was grinning, and the circle smelled blood.

"No, no, go on," another one said. "Twenty years ago. She gives him the choice, her or the five-year contract, and this genius sits there at the kitchen table and says he needs to think about it."

"He needed to think about it," a third voice confirmed solemnly. "I heard this myself. Like it was a permits question."

"The contract won," the first man said, spreading his hands as a man unveiling a monument. "And she left, and he wrote her one letter, one, and we all had to hear about that letter for a year."

"It was a good letter," Ross said, with the wounded dignity of a man who knew he was losing.

"It was three sentences," someone said, and the drum fire got a laugh out of that, and even the walking stick woman was laughing, and I sat there with the flask in my hand feeling something I hadn't planned on feeling, which was warm, and also like I wanted to win something.