The Nightshift Truce

The Crooked Moose was emptying out around eleven. I'd been sitting with Randall for three hours while he explained, for the third time, that the divorce was fine, they were both adults, nobody cheated, it was just time.

"Say it one more time," I told him. "I almost believe you now."

He laughed and paid the tab before I could stop him. Twenty-eight years old and I still let my friends buy my dinners. He was thirty-one, making lieutenant money now, so I let it go.

We walked out to the lot. His ex's SUV was already gone. Mine was the only truck left besides a motorcycle I didn't look at twice.

"Go home, Vern," Randall said. "Sleep. Stop babysitting me."

"I'm not babysitting. I'm celebrating your freedom."

"Go." He got in his pickup and pulled out, and I stood there in the cold with my keys in my hand.

That's when Cal came out of the dark.

"You're still driving that rust bucket," he said. "Christ. It get you here in one piece?"

Cal. The ranger station mechanic. We'd been circling each other for two years, ever since I transferred up to the northern district. He was thirty, built like someone who wrestles engines for a living, and he had a talent for getting under my skin in ways I didn't have words for.

"The truck runs fine," I said.

"Runs. Sure. Sounds like a dying moose."

"Your bike sounds worse."

He actually smiled at that. Then he swung onto the motorcycle and it caught on the second try, and he rolled out of the lot ahead of me, and I told myself I wasn't watching his back the whole time.

I was.

The road north out of town is gravel for thirty miles, then pavement, then gravel again. Cal ran his bike hot in front of me the whole way, like he had something to prove, which he always did. I kept the headlights on him and thought about nothing in particular.

Then the rain started. Then it got serious. Then I hit the curve by Miller's Creek and my lights caught water running across the road where water had no business being.

Cal was already stopped. His bike was on its side and he was standing over it in the rain, and I could see past him where the washout had eaten half the road. A black gap, maybe twenty feet, water roaring through the bottom of it.

"Whoa," I said, getting out. "That wasn't there this morning."

"No kidding." He was soaked through. "Bike's dead. Clipped the soft shoulder coming around."

"You okay?"

"I'm great," he said, which meant no.

I looked at the washout. I looked at the rain. I looked at him standing there with a dead machine and no phone signal and forty miles of nothing behind us.

"Get in," I said. "I'll drop you at the station."

He hesitated. Two full seconds of pride fighting practicality, and practicality won, because it was raining harder.

"Fine."

He wrestled the bike upright, dragged it off the road, and threw his leg over the back of my seat like getting into my truck was a punishment he'd earned. The cab filled up with wet man and wet denim and the smell of engine oil.

"The seat," he said.

"What about it."

"I'm dripping on it."

"It's a truck seat, Cal. It's had worse."

He snorted and settled in, and we pulled a U-turn and headed back the way we came. The station was closer than town by a mile, maybe two.

We bickered the whole way. It's what we do. I don't know when it started. He said my tires were bald. I said his bike was older than my tires. He said firefighters were just drivers with good PR. I told him mechanics were firefighters who couldn't pass the physical.

"That's a lie and you know it," he said.

"Do I?"

"You know it."

But he was almost laughing when he said it, and the rain hammered the roof, and I drove slower than I needed to.

The Lost Creek station sits alone off the main road, a wooden outpost with a workshop bay and a bunk room out back. There's a bell on the porch, old and crooked, and it rings when the wind hits it right. Cal's the only full-time mechanic there. I'd dropped off vehicles before. I'd never been inside after dark.

I pulled into the yard and the porch light came on over the bell, and the bell was ringing. Hard. Steady. Ring after ring.

"Someone's here," I said.

"It's the wind," Cal said. "It's always the wind. It does this."

"It's ringing like somebody's leaning on it."

"It's a crooked bell in a windstorm, Vern. Use your head."

We got out anyway. The porch was empty. The yard was empty. Rain and mud and dark trees, and the bell swinging like crazy with no hand on it.

"You know what this is," I said.

"Don't."

"It's a ghost."

"I swear to God."

"Old trapper died out here in the fifties. Bet he rings the bell when company shows up."

"There's no trapper. There's no ghost. There's wind." He shoved past me, wet boots loud on the boards, and got the door open. "Get inside before you freeze."

The inside was warm. A wood stove ticking, a table with papers on it, a coffee pot that had seen better decades. A cot in the corner with an army blanket folded on it like furniture mattered. The workshop bay connected through a door, tools everywhere, a snowmobile half taken apart.

"Cozy," I said.

"Wipe your feet."

"Yes, Mom."

"Say that again and you're walking back to town."

I wiped my feet.

I tried my phone while Cal toweled off. Two bars in town. Out here, nothing. Not one bar. The screen just said no service like it was personally offended.

"Dispatch is going to want a report on that washout," I said. "Road's gone. That's a big deal up here."

"Signal's dead till you crest the ridge by the creek. You're not walking that in this rain. And the low crossing back toward town goes under in weather like this, so we're boxed in till it drops."

"So we wait."

"Wait for what?"

"First light. The water drops, I double back with the truck, see if there's a crossing left. If not, I drive in and report from town."

Cal tossed the towel on the stove rail. "Fine. There's coffee. There's a second cot in the back. Don't touch my tools."

"Wasn't planning to."

"Everyone plans to. They touch them anyway."

The bell rang again outside, six slow rings, and Cal's jaw tightened. I watched him try to ignore it.

"Want me to check the porch?" I asked.

"No."

"It could be the trapper."

"There is no trapper, you made him up five minutes ago."

"I made up the death. The trapper's real. There's a plaque."

"There's no plaque."

There was, actually. Inside the door, brass, 1954. I pointed at it and Cal looked at it and refused to react, which was its own kind of funny.

"Sit down," he said. "Coffee's on the warmer. It's old."

"How old?"

"Drink it or don't."

I poured two cups. He took his without thanking me, which was somehow polite for him. We sat at the table with the papers on it, and the stove ticked, and the bell rang when the wind gusts came, and outside the rain kept coming down like it had a grudge.

"So," Cal said. "Randall's dinner. That was tonight, right?"

"Yeah. He's doing okay. Better than he acts."

"Didn't know you two were close."

"Ten years. He got me the job up here."

"Huh." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table. "The washout. That puts you here till morning. With me."

"I noticed."

"Okay," he said. "Just so we're clear on it."

"We're clear."

He nodded and looked at the stove, and I looked at the rain on the windows, and the bell rang one more time, and neither of us checked.

Cal drank his coffee like it had wronged him and he was letting it slide. He made a face after the first sip.

"This coffee's a war crime," I said.

"It's three days old. It builds character."

"You drink this every day?"

"I drink coffee every day. This is what happens when I'm not expecting company." He turned his cup another quarter. "I was at the Moose tonight, you know. Randall's thing. Back end of the bar."

"I didn't see you."

"You and him had a whole thing going. I didn't want to cut in." He turned his cup. "I didn't want to go at all."

"Then why'd you show up?"

"Owed him a favor. He sat with my bike for six hours on the Miller Creek pull-off last fall. Waited for me to get the parts truck out there. He never billed the station for the tow." He shrugged. "So when he says come by, you come by."

"That's it? That's the whole favor?"

"That's it."

"You could've just bought him a case of beer."

"Randall doesn't drink beer. He drinks those seltzer things. Like someone who's given up on joy." He almost smiled at his own joke, then killed it. "Anyway. I figured one beer, show my face, done. Then you offered me a ride and here I am."

"Here you are."

"Stuck with a firefighter. In the woods. In a storm."

"You make it sound like a punishment."

"Isn't it?" He looked at me over the cup, and I couldn't tell if he was joking. That was the usual problem with Cal. Two years of not being able to tell.

"Randall talks about you," I said. "At the dinner. He said you're the best mechanic north of Whitehorse and the worst guest he's ever had."

"He said that?"

"He said you left his housewarming party after forty minutes because you'd rather look at a snowblower."

"The snowblower had a seized auger. It was a medical emergency."

"So you're soft. Is what I'm hearing."

"I'm not soft."

"You went to a dinner you didn't want to go to, for a favor, in the rain, on a dead motorcycle. That's soft with a shell on it. Like a crab. A crab that's secretly nice."

"Careful," he said, but his voice had gone quiet, not sharp. He set the cup down. "You've been circling me for two years, Vern. You don't get to decide what I am."

"I don't circle you."

"You drive out here to drop off vehicles. You could radio the parts in. You drive out here."

That landed harder than I wanted it to. I drank my terrible coffee instead of answering. Three days old was generous. Four. Maybe five.

The stove ticked. The bell rang somewhere out in the