Moe Yazzie is 53, spent 22 years on federal wildland fire crews before a blown ACL and a rookie’s broken leg he still blames himself for pushed him into semi-retirement running backcountry hiking and fishing guides out of Flagstaff. He’s leaning against the chipped red brick of the downtown beer garden’s outer wall, sipping a lime seltzer he’d grabbed to avoid the temptation of craft IPAs, watching the Fourth of July crowd mill past. The air smells like charred bratwurst, pine drifting down from the San Francisco Peaks, and faint, sweet wood smoke from the bonfire at the end of the block. A country cover band is grinding through a wobbly version of a 90s Travis Tritt track, the bass thrumming so hard it vibrates through the brick at his back. He’d planned to leave an hour prior. The crowd is too loud, too full of young seasonal crew kids with new fire tattoos and too much untested energy, and he doesn’t feel like making small talk with guys who still call him “cap” like he didn’t quit mid-season after that 2019 Tinder Fire mess that still wakes him up some nights.
Then he spots her. Clara Marlow, 48, ex-wife of the guy who replaced him as crew lead, who served her papers three weeks back for a 22-year-old rookie he’d been sneaking around with on cross-state fire assignments. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts and a faded 2022 fire crew hoodie, silver hoop earrings catching the neon pink glow from the bar’s open sign, and she’s weaving through the crowd straight toward him. He tenses. He’s avoided her for six months, ever since they’d been stuck waiting out a monsoon rainstorm in his truck last fall, talking for two hours about how her husband worked 18 hour days and never asked how her small pottery studio was doing, never even noticed she’d dyed her hair a soft honey blonde. He’d left that day with the smell of her lavender hand lotion stuck in his nose and a twisting guilt in his gut, like he was betraying the entire crew by even thinking about her that way. He’s always been the kind of guy who puts loyalty above everything, even when it cost him his last marriage, even when it meant he turned down a promotion he’d earned 10 years prior to stay with his crew.
She stops half a foot from him, close enough he can smell the coconut sunscreen she’s wearing under the lavender, and grins, holding up two cans of grapefruit seltzer. “Saw you hiding over here,” she yells over the band, leaning in so her shoulder bumps his bicep when she speaks, the soft fabric of her hoodie brushing his bare arm. “Figured you didn’t want the guys shoving IPAs at you all night.” He takes the seltzer, their fingers brushing when he grabs it, her skin soft against the calluses on his hands from decades of holding chainsaws and shovel handles. They find an empty concrete curb 20 feet from the crowd, the concrete still warm from the day’s 82 degree sun, sitting so their knees knock when either of them shifts. She tells him about the new hand-thrown mug line she’s selling at the downtown farmers market, how she sold out of the fire-themed ones in 45 minutes last Saturday. He tells her about a guided fishing trip he took last week where a 70 year old tourist from Chicago caught a 22 inch rainbow trout, cried when he released it back into the creek. Every time she laughs she tilts her head toward him, her shoulder pressing solidly against his, and he doesn’t move away.
The first firework goes off overhead, a burst of electric blue that paints her face pale for half a second, and a stray spark drifts down, landing on the collar of her hoodie. He brushes it off before she can react, his knuckles grazing the soft, freckled skin of her collarbone, and she goes quiet for a beat, her eyes fixed on his mouth, the noise of the crowd fading to a low hum for a second. “I’ve wanted you to do that for months,” she says, so quiet he almost misses it over the crackle of the next round of fireworks. He freezes, the guilt he’s been carrying for six months warring with the low, steady heat he’s felt every time he’s even thought about her, the way he’s replayed that rainstorm truck conversation a hundred times when he’s alone at night. He’s never been the kind of guy to go after another man’s wife, but he knows that guy left her, knows she’s been sleeping on her sister’s couch for three weeks, knows he’s been an idiot to push her away out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to a crew that didn’t even check in on him when he was recovering from knee surgery. “I’ve been an idiot,” he says, and he can hear the roughness in his own voice, and she smiles, soft, not the loud teasing grin she uses with everyone else. “Took you long enough to figure that out,” she says.
The next round of fireworks goes off, red and gold, lighting up the entire street in shifting, warm light. He stands first, holding out a hand to pull her up, and she laces her fingers through his, her palm small and warm against his. They walk past the crowd, no one paying them any attention, toward his beat up 2018 Silverado parked three blocks over. She squeezes his hand when they turn the corner, and he unlocks the passenger door, holding it open for her, letting her climb in before he circles around to the driver’s side. He turns the key in the ignition, the radio clicking on to an old Johnny Cash track, and pulls away from the curb, her hand still resting light on his thigh.
