Rafe Mendez, 57, spent 22 years as a smokejumper before a blown knee and a 2018 Yellowstone blaze that left a silvered scar snaking up his left forearm pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a small wildfire education nonprofit out of a converted garage in Bozeman, and his only consistent companion is a three-legged hound dog named Ash that he pulled from a burn zone six years prior. His biggest flaw, if you ask his old jump crew buddy Jake, is that he’s spent the last 8 years treating any friendly advance from a woman like it’s a wildfire he needs to contain before it spreads. He’d avoided every community mixer, charity cookout, and even the annual fire department holiday party since his wife left him for a real estate developer in Denver, figuring loneliness was easier than the mess of explaining why he still wakes up at 3 a.m. reaching for his jump gear.
He only showed up to the late-summer beer garden fundraiser for the county food bank because Jake threatened to post old photos of him in his 90s jump uniform, neon green helmet and all, on the local Facebook group if he bailed. The air smelled like fried green tomatoes and pine, peanut shells crunched under his steel-toe boots, and the country cover band in the corner was playing a terrible but enthusiastic rendition of a 90s Travis Tritt track so loud it vibrated in his molars. He’d just volunteered to auction off a guided three-day backcountry hike through the Gallatin Range, figured he’d fulfill his obligation, grab a six pack to go, and head home before anyone tried to set him up with their cousin’s divorced friend.
He was reaching for an IPA from the tap when his hand brushed another, cold condensation from the pint glass the other person was holding seeping into the hair on his wrist. He looked down, then up, at the woman holding the glass: sharp auburn hair pulled back in a braid, flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows, calluses scattered across her knuckles, a smudge of dirt on her left cheek. She laughed, a low, rough sound that cut through the band noise, and wiped the condensation off his wrist with the edge of her shirt before he could pull away. “Sorry about that,” she said, leaning in so he could hear her, her shoulder brushing his bicep. “The guy behind me bumped my elbow. I’m Elara, just started as the county extension agent last month.”
She didn’t step back after she finished talking. Most people did, once they got a look at his scar, or recognized him from the local news spots he did about fire safety, or heard the quiet rumor that he was still broken up over his ex. She just held his gaze, dark green eyes crinkling at the corners when he told her he ran the fire ed nonprofit, nodded when he mentioned the hike he was auctioning off, and snort-laughed when he joked that half the people who signed up for his hikes couldn’t tell a Douglas fir from a Ponderosa pine. She smelled like lavender shampoo and pine sap, like she’d spent the day out in the woods, and when a group of drunk college kids pushed past them, she grabbed his forearm to steady herself, her thumb brushing right over the raised edge of his scar, like she didn’t even notice it was there. He knew half the regulars at the beer garden were glancing their way, because everyone in town had written him off as permanently, intentionally single, so even standing that close to someone new felt like a small, delicious act of rebellion.
Rafe tensed up at first, the way he always did when someone got too close, half ready to make an excuse to leave. But she didn’t say anything about the scar, didn’t give him that pitying smile everyone else did when they asked how he got it. She just told him she’d spent the last 10 years in Portland, moved to Montana after her kid left for NYU to study forestry, and that she’d been sneaking onto Forest Service land to camp illegally since she was 16. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel like he had to perform the role of the tough, grieving ex-smokejumper. He just talked, about Ash, about the time he jumped a fire outside Missoula and landed in a patch of poison ivy, about how he still missed the thrill of free fall even though his knee ached too bad to jump anymore.
When the auction started, Elara stayed right next to him, her shoulder pressed to his the whole time. When the auctioneer announced the guided hike, she raised her paddle first, grinning over at him when a group of local ranch wives started bidding against her. She outbid all of them by $120, winking when the auctioneer banged his gavel and called her name as the winner.
The crowd thinned out after the auction, the temperature dropping enough that Rafe could see his breath fog in front of his face when he walked her to her beat up old Subaru, the back window covered in stickers that said “Plant More Native Grasses” and “Burn Ban Means You, Gary.” She stopped him before he could turn to walk back to his truck, her hand wrapping around his wrist again, the callus on her thumb catching on the edge of his scar. “I don’t just want the hike, for the record,” she said, holding his gaze, no hint of shyness in her voice. “I want to grab dinner first. Tomorrow night. The taco joint on Main, 7 p.m. Don’t make me auction off something else to get you to say yes.”
Rafe hesitated for half a second, the part of him that’d spent 8 years walling himself off screaming that this was a bad idea, that he was too old, too broken, too used to being alone to mess with something new. But the other part of him, the part that used to jump out of planes into wildfires for fun, that missed the thrill of not knowing what was coming next, won out. He nodded, and he even smiled, a real one, not the tight polite one he saved for local news interviews. “7 p.m. works,” he said. “Just don’t complain if I show up in steel toes again.”
She laughed, squeezed his wrist once before letting go, and climbed into her Subaru, waving out the window as she pulled out of the parking lot. Rafe stood there for a minute, the cold air stinging his cheeks, before he turned to walk back to his own truck, where Ash was waiting in the passenger seat, snuffling at the window. He climbed in, turned the key in the ignition, and reached over to scratch Ash behind the ears, the faint ghost of Elara’s callus still lingering on his forearm.
