Tent Nine

Wallace pulled into Cedar Bend at four in the afternoon on a Friday in mid-October. The road in was gravel for the last two miles, and his truck took it slow. He was forty-four, an electrician by trade, and he had volunteered to be the camp host for the weekend mostly because nobody else would do it. The campground had a dozen tent sites scattered under Douglas firs, a hand-pump well, two pit toilets, and on most October weekends, zero customers.

The ranger station was a small clapboard building with a plywood ramp. Nobody was inside. There was a clipboard on the counter with a note taped above it. The note said the combo for the fuse box was on the clipboard, and the fuse box was behind the men's pit toilet, and please fix the light because campers kept complaining. The light over the pump had been out since August, from what Wallace heard. That was the real reason he'd signed up. Solitude was the other reason, and he figured he'd get a full dose of both.

He signed the host sheet, took the host parking spot by Site One, and walked the loop once. The leaves were turning along the creek side of the campground. Yellow mostly. A couple of sites had fire rings with old ash in them, rained on and flattened. Site Nine sat at the far end, near the pump, and it was empty, which suited him fine. He had his own tent and a small propane stove and a bag of groceries that would last three days without any trouble.

* * *

The fuse box was bolted to a post behind the men's pit toilet. It was one of those gray metal boxes that had been out in the weather since sometime in the nineties. Wallace set down his tool bag and took the lock off with the combo from the clipboard. Inside, half the breakers were labeled in faded marker and half were labeled not at all. The one marked PUMP LIGHT was off. He flipped it and nothing happened, which told him the problem was somewhere else.

He checked the light fixture itself first. The housing was full of water. A dead moth sat inside the lens along with maybe a tablespoon of rainwater that had gotten in through a cracked gasket. He unscrewed the lens, dumped the water out, and cleaned the contacts with a bit of emery cloth from his bag. Then he followed the conduit back toward the box, opening a junction along the way. The wire nuts in that junction had been twisted by somebody who either didn't care or didn't know. He redid them, taped everything, and went back to the breaker. Flipped it. Nothing.

So the fault was farther down the line, probably at the pump itself, or in a splice he hadn't found yet. That was fine. He had all weekend. He sat on an empty five-gallon bucket and ate a sandwich while he thought about it. The air was cool, maybe fifty degrees, and it smelled like wet fir needles.

That was when the Subaru came in.

* * *

It was a dusty green wagon with a roof box, and it came down the gravel slow, the same way he had. It passed Site One, passed Sites Two through Eight, and pulled into Site Nine, the empty one right next to where he was sitting with his sandwich. A woman got out. She was thirty-eight or thereabouts, tall, with her hair in a braid and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt. She stretched her arms up over her head and looked around at the trees like she was checking them against something.

Then she saw him and waved.

"Wallace, right?" she called. "Gina said you'd be out here."

He knew the face once she said the name. Cecelia. He'd met her twice at cookouts over the past couple years, at the house of a mutual friend named Gina. He remembered her being the person at the party who fixed the grill when it wouldn't light. Beyond that, nothing.

"That's me," he said. "You're Cecelia. Gina's friend."

"Cecelia, yeah." She walked over, stepping around the fire ring. "Gina mentioned you were hosting this weekend. She said the campground was basically empty and I needed a last-minute getaway, so here I am. I hope that's okay. Site Nine had no reservation card."

"It's first come," he said. "It's fine."

He explained, a little stiffly, that he was the host and not a tour guide, and that the main services were the pump, the pit toilets, and firewood he'd be splitting tomorrow. She laughed at that, not mean, just a short laugh, and said she'd camped enough to know how a campground worked. She had her own tent, her own stove, her own everything. She just didn't want to be alone alone, apparently. Not on this particular weekend.

"Fire's at eight if you want company," he offered. "I've got a chair spare. Otherwise no hard feelings."

"I'll be there," she said, and went to set up her tent.

* * *

Wallace spent the rest of the afternoon back at the fuse box chasing the fault. He traced the pump circuit past the well, found the splice he'd missed under a rock, and fixed a corroded connection there. By the time he flipped the breaker again, the light over the pump buzzed once and came on, steady and a little ugly, the way fluorescent lights look at dusk. Small win. He wrote it down on the clipboard in the space for host notes, in case the ranger cared, which he doubted.

He got a fire going at his own ring around seven. The wood was damp on the outside, so he built it small and fed it. By eight there was a decent bed of coals and a pot of chili warming on a grate. Cecelia came over at eight exactly, carrying a camp chair that folded up into a bag. She set it down next to the spare folding chair he'd brought out, then ignored both and sat on the log. She had a beer with her and a pack of cigarettes, and she asked before lighting one. He said go ahead, the smoke was going straight up anyway.

They talked about nothing important. That was the word for it, nothing important. She asked if the pump light was the famous broken one, and he said it was fixed as of an hour ago, and she said the forest service should put him on a stamp. He told her the chili was from a can, doctored up, and she said canned chili at a campfire beat a lot of fancier meals she'd had. They talked about the drive in, and about how the gravel always ate one hubcap a season, and about Gina's dog, whose name Wallace had forgotten and pretended he hadn't.

At some point he noticed she smelled like pine and cigarette smoke. It wasn't a bad combination out here. It fit. It was the smell the campground itself was trying for, he thought, and failing at, because the campground just smelled like wet dirt and old ash.

"You're staring at the fire," she said.

"Thinking about a junction box," he said.

"That's a lie. Nobody thinks about a junction box while looking at a fire."

"It was a good junction," he said. "Tight twists, clean tape."

She laughed and ashed her cigarette into the fire. The conversation drifted again after that. She said she worked at a print shop in the valley, running the big digital press, and that the shop had laid off two guys in September and the mood in there had gone bad. That was the getaway reason, she guessed. She hadn't planned on Gina knowing anyone out here. She'd planned on a tent and a book and nobody asking her how she was holding up.

"You could ask," she said. "You'd be the first one this week."

"How are you holding up," he said.

"Terrible. It's great out here." She smiled and drank her beer.

The fire popped once and sent up a little fountain of sparks. Wallace fed it another piece of wood and decided, in a quiet way, that the weekend had gotten less solitary than he'd planned, and that this did not bother him the way he'd expected it to. He was forty-four and single by choice and mostly happy that way, but there was a difference between choosing your own company and having it forced on you, and tonight the company had walked in on its own.

"Same time tomorrow?" she asked, standing up and brushing off her jeans.

"I'll have firewood split by then," he said.

"I'll bring something better than canned chili," she said, and picked up her chair, and walked the fifty feet back to Site Nine through the dark, her headlamp bobbing.

Wallace sat by the fire a while longer, doing the dishes in a bucket of water he'd heated on the grate. He thought about the junction box again, and this time it was true. Then he banked the fire and went to his tent, and the pump light hummed over the well all night, working for the first time since August.

Saturday started with frost on the tent fly. Wallace crawled out at six thirty and stood by the well in his jacket, breathing steam, admiring his own light bulb working over the pump. Petty pride, but it counted. He split wood for an hour with the campground maul, which had a handle wrapped in duct tape and a head shaped as if it had strong feelings about rocks. By nine he had a respectable pile. He ate oatmeal, checked the pit toilets for paper, which was the whole host job most days, and swept needles off the bulletin board kiosk. Cecelia's tent stayed shut until ten. Then the green nylon rustled and she came out with her hair mashed sideways and a sleeping bag wrapped around her shoulders like a cape.

"Morning," she said. "The light works. I saw it at two in the morning when I went to the toilet."

"That's the point of it," he said.

"At two in the morning it's mostly ugly," she said. "But it works." She dropped into his camp chair without asking and looked at the woodpile. "You actually split all that."

"Cheap entertainment," he said. He was forty-four and it was honestly the best part of his week.

She went and got her stove and made coffee, and came back with two cups, handing him one, which seemed a small thing and wasn't. They sat in the frost-bleached morning and drank it. Around ten she said her batteries were low, the lantern kind, D cells, and she'd only brought one pack, and her book was long.

"So?" he said.

"So here's a thought," Cecelia said. She looked at him over her cup. "My tent and your tent. They're the same model. I noticed this morning. If you zip the doors together, they make one big room. Two flies, two floors, one space. We could run one lantern instead of two and read in the middle."

Wallace considered this. It was, on its face, a suggestion about batteries. "That's very practical," he said.

"It's extremely practical," she said. "I'm a very practical person. Ask Gina."

"I'd rather not call Gina."

"Then take my word."

So that afternoon, mostly because it was practical and partly for other reasons he didn't itemize, they