The Last Watch

The quiet up here was the thing I kept waiting to get used to. Two weeks on the Andersson tower, they said, just enough to cover for the regular operator while she recovered from knee surgery. I said yes before I even thought about it. That was six weeks after Steven and I ended things, and I kind of needed the forest more than I needed the city.

The tower itself was old and stubborn. A hundred steps up a steel staircase, and then a cab at the top with a cot, a radio desk, a propane stove, and windows on all four sides. The forest went out from there in every direction, green all the way to the haze. Some mornings the clouds sat down in the trees like they were tired, and I'd drink my coffee and just watch them sit there.

I was twenty-eight, and I told myself this trip was about the new job. I start in the city in October, a real desk with a real chair and probably a real amount of stress. So this was my last stretch of nothing. My last stretch of hearing wind instead of traffic.

Mostly that was true. Some of it was also about Steven. We'd been together five years, from twenty-three to twenty-eight, which sounds like a sentence when I say it out loud. It ended the way long things end, sort of quietly, both of us tired in a way sleep couldn't fix. I didn't hate him. I just couldn't be in our apartment anymore, and the forest doesn't remind you of anybody.

So I settled into a routine. Coffee at sunrise. A loop around the catwalk with binoculars. Radio check at nine. Lunch. Another loop. Read half a paperback. Make dinner on the propane stove and eat it watching the sun go down behind ridges I couldn't name. It was good. It was maybe too good, because I caught myself talking out loud just to hear a voice.

Day four was when the truck showed up.

I heard it before I saw it, an engine grinding up the steep dirt road below, the kind of sound that does not belong in your quiet. I grabbed the binoculars and leaned out the window. A dusty white pickup crawled up through the trees, kicking up a little tail of tan dust. My first thought was, please don't be lost hunters. My second thought was, please don't be a fire.

The truck parked below the tower and a guy got out. Tall, maybe early thirties, ball cap, work shirt with a company logo I couldn't read at that distance. He looked up at the tower, and I swear I saw him sigh at the stairs.

I went down to meet him. By the time I hit the bottom landing he was already climbing, a toolbox in one hand and a long gray equipment case over his shoulder. He looked up and gave me a half wave.

"Afternoon," he called up. "Hope you're expecting me."

"I'm really not," I said.

He reached my landing and set the toolbox down so he could shake my hand. His palm was rough and his grip was quick.

"Austin," he said. "Radio Systems out of Coeur Lane. They were supposed to call the district office and have them pass it along. Somebody dropped that ball, I'm guessing."

"Nobody called me," I said. "I'm Renee. I'm the temporary operator."

"Well, nice to meet you anyway." He picked the toolbox back up. "There's a contract to install new radio gear on this tower. New antenna up top, new repeater in the cab, and the district wants it done before fire season planning kicks off. I'm the poor sucker they sent."

"And how long is that gonna take?"

"Two days, if the weather holds. Three if it doesn't." He squinted up at the sky, which was a flat harmless blue. "Looks like two."

I stood there doing the math I didn't want to do. Two days of a stranger in my cab, in my quiet, in the little world I'd built around my own broken heart. But I also knew the deal. The district office had every right to send contractors up, and the radio was the one thing I actually needed working if I spotted smoke.

"Alright," I said. "Where do you want to set up?"

"Wherever's out of your way. I know this is your space for a couple weeks and I don't plan to step on it." He tapped the gray case. "Honestly, half my work is on the roof and the catwalk. You won't even see me most of the day."

"You say that like it's a promise," I said, and he laughed.

He had an easy kind of laugh. Not a perform one, just a let it out one. I noticed that and then made a point of not noticing anything else.

We climbed back up together, him huffing a little on the last flight, me pretending I wasn't watching. In the cab he set his cases down by the radio desk and just stood there a second, turning in a slow circle, taking in the windows.

"Man," he said. "They don't pay me enough to see views like this."

"You get views on these jobs?"

"Sometimes. Mostly I get rooftops and gravel pads." He pointed at the cot. "That's yours?"

"That's mine. Ten more nights, give or take."

"Where do you sleep while I'm here, then? Because I'm not putting you out of your own cot."

"I've got a cot in the storage locker below. It's fine. I've slept worse."

"That seems backwards," he said, frowning. "You live here, I'm the visitor."

"Austin, you're installing equipment for two days. I can sleep in a storage locker for two days. It's got a window and everything." I smiled so he'd know I wasn't mad. "Besides, my stuff's already in there anyway. Half my clothes never came upstairs."

He looked like he wanted to argue, then didn't. "Okay, but I'm bringing my own sleeping bag and it goes on the floor, and you get the cot at night. Deal?"

"Deal," I said, surprised at how easy that was.

He got to work right away, which I appreciated. He ran cable out the window and up onto the roof, and for most of the afternoon the only sounds in my quiet were his boots on the catwalk and the occasional clank of a wrench. I sat at the radio desk with my paperback and pretended to read. Mostly I listened to him work.

Around four he came back in, wiping his hands on a rag.

"So how long have you been up here?" he asked.

"Four days."

"And how's the peace treating you?"

"It's good," I said. Too quick, probably, because he gave me a look.

"That was a fast answer. Like a rehearsed answer."

"It's quiet," I said. "That's the whole point. I start a new job soon and I wanted some nothing before it."

"Fair enough." He sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and cracked a water bottle. "I'm not gonna poke at it. But I'll say this, I've worked a lot of towers, and the quiet ones always got a story."

"Maybe I just like trees."

"Sure," he said, and drank his water, and let it go. I liked that he let it go.

We made a sort of dinner arrangement without ever really discussing it. I had the stove and most of the food, and he had a cooler in the truck with sandwich stuff and enough coffee to survive a siege. He said he'd buy groceries in town tomorrow if I gave him a list, and I wrote one out, and he read it and said, "You want real food, not gas station food," like that was a decision worth respecting.

By dark he had the antenna mounted and half the cable run. He rolled his sleeping bag out on the floor by the window, and I took the stairs down to the storage locker with my toothbrush and a blanket, feeling a little ridiculous about the whole thing.

"Hey, Renee," he called down the stairwell before I got far. "If you hear me snoring, you're allowed to throw something. Nothing heavy."

"There's a wrench right here by the door," I called back.

"There it is. That's the hospitality I heard about in the brochure."

I slept fine, actually. Better than I had the first three nights, which I decided was the fresh air and not the sound of somebody else breathing a floor above me.

The next morning he was up before me, working on the repeater with headphones on, and I made coffee for two without thinking about it until I was already doing it. I handed him a mug and he took off one earphone.

"Thanks. You didn't have to."

"I know," I said. "Habit."

"Well, it's a good habit." He looked at the list on the desk. "I'm heading to town around eight for the parts and your groceries. Anything else?"

"Just be back before the radio check," I said. "If the district calls and I don't answer, they send somebody up with worse questions than yours."

He grinned and drained the coffee. "Two hours, tops. Save my spot."

And he was gone down the stairs, and then I heard the truck, and then my quiet came back, and it felt different somehow. Thinner. Like a room with the furniture rearranged.

I sat at the radio desk with my coffee and my paperback and I waited for the sound of an engine coming back up the hill, and I was honest with myself for about one second about what that meant, and then I went back to not noticing anything.

* * *

He was back in ninety minutes with a flat of peaches, a bag of onions, and a grocery sack that weighed more than my whole kit. He also had a record player.

"Okay, explain that," I said, pointing at it while he dug through bags on the counter.

"Explain what?"

"The record player, Austin. In the grocery sack. Next to the onions."

"Oh, that!" He set it on the desk like it