The Fire Watch

*Just a story about two old-timers who find a little comfort in a cold forest. No big drama, just a couple of lonely people and a fire. Hope you like it.*

I packed the truck at four in the afternoon and didn't tell anybody where I was going, because there was nobody to tell. Three years since Ellen died, and I still caught myself thinking I should leave a note on the fridge. Old habits don't quit, they just sit there like an old dog that won't get off the couch.

It was the fifth of November. I don't make a big deal of the date. I don't need to, my body makes a big deal of it for me. I'd woken up at five in the morning with my chest tight and my head in a fog, and by noon I knew I wasn't going to sit in that house all night with the TV talking at me.

So I threw the tent and the cooler in the F-150 and drove the forty minutes out to Granite Creek. National forest land, a little campground at the bottom of the falls trail. They'd put in fire rings and pit toilets a few years back, half-finished the whole time, but it was cheap and it was quiet and nobody checked on you after dark.

I'm Tony Pike, by the way. Sixty-three years old, plumber, thirty-eight years in the trade, retired last spring when my knees filed their final complaint. Widower. That's the short version.

The campground was empty except for one pop-up trailer way over by the creek. I picked a site in the middle row, backed the truck in, and got to work on the tent while there was still light. Late autumn comes on quick out there. By six the sky was the color of an old nickel and the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

I got the tent up about half wrong, pulled a stake, and did it over. My hands knew the work even if my head didn't. That's the thing about a lifetime of fixing things. Your hands keep going when the rest of you wants to sit down in the dirt.

I had a fire going in the ring and a lawn chair under me by full dark. Cheap beer in a cooler, a cooler full of nothing else, because I hadn't planned past the beer. There was a pack of hot dogs in there somewhere. I'd figure it out.

I was on my second beer and doing a fair job of not thinking about anything when I heard an engine coming up the gravel loop. Not the truck kind of engine. A little four-cylinder grinding like it had opinions about the road.

Headlights swept across my site and kept going, then stopped two sites down. Doors, engine off, and then a woman's voice saying something I couldn't make out, sharp, like she was arguing with the car itself.

* * *

I gave it a minute. Then a flashlight beam came swinging through the trees toward me, and behind it came a woman in a big wool coat, hauling a duffel bag that looked like it weighed more than she did.

"Evening," she called out. "Is this place open? There's no booth or anything."

"No booth," I said. "You just pick a spot and hope the ranger shows up in the morning. He usually doesn't."

She came closer and the flashlight caught her face, and I knew her right away. Selina Cooke now. Sam Hartman, back when we were in school together. I'd heard about the change, the way you hear everything in a town like ours, and I'd have known her anyway. She'd aged the way people do, some lines, some gray in her hair, but the same face underneath.

"Tony Pike," I said, standing up out of the chair. "Selina?"

She stopped dead and put the light right on me. "Well, I'll be damned. Tony Pike. You still have that truck?"

"Same truck, same everything. What are you doing out here?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" She dropped the duffel in the dirt and stood there catching her breath. "I'm camping, apparently. My son talked me into it. Then he called an hour ago and cancelled, some work thing, and I was already halfway here and I decided to hell with it, I'm going anyway."

"How old is your son now?"

"Thirty-four. Can you believe that? I was twenty-nine when he came along." She looked around at my site, the tent, the fire. "You out here alone?"

"I am. You want to pull your chair over here? Safer than sitting alone in the dark, and I've got fire."

She looked at me for a beat, and then she laughed, a short surprised sound. "You know what, yes. Give me ten minutes. I haven't set a tent up by myself since the eighties, so say a prayer."

She went back down and I heard her wrestling with gear, cursing at poles, a zipper going up and down three times. I got two more chairs from the truck bed and set them by the fire. Then I went over and helped anyway, because her tent was winning.

"Left side goes in the sleeve first," I said, holding the pole. "You're fighting it."

"I know I'm fighting it. It started it." She pushed hair out of her face with the back of her wrist. Her hands were cold and red. "God, Tony, it's been, what, forty years since we graduated?"

"Forty-five. Class of seventy-nine."

"Don't say it out loud, it sounds worse." She fed the pole through the sleeve while I held the other end. "You look good. Thinner than you were."

"Cheaper than a gym membership. I got the plumbing knees." She didn't know about Ellen. I could see it on her face, the little pause where she was deciding whether to ask.

"How's your wife?" she said. "Ruth? Rachel?"

"Ellen. She passed. Three years ago this month."

She went still, pole in hand. "Oh, Tony. I'm so sorry. Tonight?"

"No. Couple days back," I lied, and shrugged, because there was nothing else to do with it. "I just don't like sitting in the house this time of year."

She didn't say sorry again, which I was glad for. She just nodded and finished the pole and staked her corner down. "Well," she said, "then it's a good thing we both ended up in the same empty campground, isn't it?"

I carried her duffel over and she got a camp chair out of her trunk, a folding table, a bottle of red wine with a screw top. I had a couple of those folding tables in the truck bed, so between us we made a real camp of it.

She was sixty-three, she told me, same as me, a month younger, and she said she'd lorded that month over me since the first grade. Retired from the county assessor's office. Divorced eleven years back, from a wife named Gail who she described, in her words, as a woman who peaked at forty and kept billing for it. She lived over in Cedar Falls now, forty minutes from my place, and we'd probably passed each other at the grocery store a dozen times without knowing it.

"I'd have known," she said, pouring wine into a plastic cup for me even though I had beer. "I'd have known you anywhere. You had the same scowl at eighteen."

"This is not a scowl. This is a face."

"It's a scowl, Tony." She clinked her cup against my bottle. "To bad sons who cancel on their mothers."

"To bad sons." I drank. The wine was better than my beer, I'll admit that.

The fire cracked and threw sparks up. Somewhere down the creek there was an owl working. She told me about her son Doug, who managed a warehouse in the city and worked too much, and about her sister who kept trying to set her up with widowers from church.

"Are they all terrible?"

"One of them brought a laminated list of conversation topics." She shook her head. "I sat through a whole dinner while a man read me bullet points about his pickleball league."

I laughed harder than I had in months. It surprised me, coming out. She grinned at me over her cup like she'd won something.

"What about you?" she asked. "Anybody since Ellen?"

"No. There was a woman at the lodge who kept asking me to dinner. I kept finding reasons."

"Three years of reasons?"

"I guess they added up." I looked into the fire instead of at her. "It's not grief exactly, after a while. It's just that nobody knew me when I was young. Everybody I meet now gets the version that's already finished. You know?"

She was quiet a second. "I know exactly," she said. "That's why I drove out here alone in the dark to sleep on the ground at sixty-three years old." She held her cup out and I clinked it. "Well. Here's to unfinished versions."

The night got colder and we moved the chairs closer to the flames, and closer to each other, not on purpose. She burned her first hot dog and blamed me for talking during the rotation. I gave her my good one. Around ten the wine bottle was empty and neither of us had mentioned going to our own tents.

"Tony," she said, "be honest. Am I keeping you up?"

"You're the best thing that's happened to this campground since they put in the pit toilets."

"That's a low bar and you know it." She laughed and pulled her coat tighter. Her knee was touching mine and neither of us moved it.

The fire settled down to coals. I got up and fed it two more pieces of split wood, and when I sat back down she had turned her chair a few degrees toward me without seeming to notice she'd done it.

The cold got to the point where I offered to get more beer out of the truck, and she said sure, and while I was digging in the cooler I heard her swearing from the direction of her tent.

"Son of a bitch."

"Everything alright?"

"No. No, everything is not alright!" She came out with her air mattress half under her arm like she was wrestling it. "It's got a leak. I can hear it. That hiss, you hear that?"

I couldn't hear anything, but I said I heard it anyway, because I'm not an animal.

"I blew it up before I left home," she said. "I checked it. Doug and I were supposed to do this in September and it was fine then." She held a section flat to the lantern light. "There. Right there, see the scuff? The dog. The dog did that in the garage, I bet. Rex."

"You brought a dog?"

"No, Tony, the dog from September. Past tense dog. My sister's dog." She dropped the mattress on the table. "I'm sixty-three years old and I'm going to sleep on the ground like a scout."

"Got a patch kit?"

"In the camping bin in my trunk, maybe, if Doug ever restocked it, which he did not, because he is my son."

"I got one in the truck." I got my coat off the chair. "Whole kit. Glue, patches, the little scuffer. Plumber's habit. I carried one in every vehicle I've owned since 1982."

She looked at me like I'd offered her a kidney. "You are kidding me."

"Forty years of crawl spaces, you learn what to keep. Come on, hold the light."

So we laid the mattress out on the folding table under the lantern and I scuffed the rubber down and she held the patch while I glued it, and her hand was steady, better than mine would've been.

"You did this your whole life," she said. "Crawl around under houses in the dark."

"Under and behind and inside. Thirty-eight years. I know every water heater in three counties by name. Well, not name. By serial number."

"That's worse."

"It is worse, yeah." I smoothed the patch down from the middle out, the way the old-timer taught me when I was twenty-two and knew nothing. "Hold it. Thirty seconds. Count if you got nothing to say."

"I always got something to say." But she counted anyway, out loud, and I watched her lips move in the lantern light and thought about how a face you knew at eighteen can come back to you forty-five years later like it was in a drawer somewhere, whole, waiting.

"There," she said. "Now what?"

"Now we wait ten minutes before you pump it up. Glue's gotta set."

"So we wait by the fire." She pulled her chair back around. "So we wait by the fire and you tell me what happened to everybody."

* * *

I'd gone back to the truck for the six-pack I'd figured I'd never drink, and by midnight we were three beers in and going down the class of 1979 like a roll call.

"Remember Bobby Danziger?"

"Remember him? He fell off my roof at a party. My parents' roof. Broke his collarbone and my mother's planter and my parents never let me have another party."

"He married Kathy Voss."

"I heard that. Everybody heard that. That