Elias Voss is 53, spent 18 years as a smokejumper before a shattered ankle and a crew loss in the 2017 Eagle Creek fire pushed him into retirement, now runs a small wildfire mitigation firm out of a converted garage outside Bend, Oregon. His biggest flaw? He’s spent 8 years letting guilt turn him into a recluse, turning down every dinner invitation, every set-up, every chance at connection because he’s convinced he doesn’t deserve soft things after he couldn’t bring his three guys home that day.
He’s at the Deschutes County summer fair on a sweltering August Saturday, mostly to avoid the developer who keeps badgering him about a consulting job for a fancy gated subdivision he doesn’t want to take. He’s leaning against a beer garden picnic table, sipping a cold IPA, when he spots Mara Hale across the space. She’s the county commissioner who voted down his low-income mitigation grant last week, the one he spent six months drafting, the one that was supposed to cover free firebreaks for every low-income senior homeowner east of the Cascades. He’d cursed her name so loud in his office that his part-time admin had left early that day.
“Came to yell at me?” she says when he stops at her table, nodding at the empty bench across from her. She’s wearing a faded red flannel tied around her waist, a plain white tank top dotted with a few fry bread crumbs, work boots caked in ranch dust, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with a single strand of silver at the temple. He sits, the weathered wooden bench creaking under his 220-pound frame.
“Was gonna,” he says, taking another sip of beer. “Until I heard through the grapevine you voted the grant down ‘cause the county was gonna skim half the funds for that stupid private golf course out by Sunriver.”
She snorts, picking a crumbly piece of fry bread off her paper plate and popping it in her mouth. Her sun-warmed arm brushes his when she reaches across the table to grab a crumpled napkin, calloused at the knuckle from years of working horses, and he feels a jolt run up his spine he hasn’t felt since before the 2017 fire. “Told ‘em I’d veto the whole damn budget if they tried to sneak that line item past me again,” she says, leaning in like she’s sharing a state secret, her voice low enough that the drunk couple next to them can’t hear. Their knees knock under the table when she shifts in her seat, and she doesn’t pull away. “Your proposal’s good. I’m reworking it, cutting the golf course out entirely, gonna present it at the next meeting. Didn’t wanna say anything ‘til I had the votes locked.”
He stares at her, the sharp, hot anger he’s carried for the last week melting so fast it makes his head spin. He’s so used to seeing people in power as selfish, as only looking out for their own campaign donors, that he didn’t stop to ask her side of the story. He notices the thin, pale scar snaking up her left wrist, asks her about it, and she laughs, a rough, throaty sound like she smokes a single cigarette after a long week. She says she got it when she was 12, trying to break a wild mustang on her dad’s ranch outside Prineville, the horse reared and dragged her through a barbed wire fence. She asks about the thick, pale scar slicing diagonally across his jaw, and he tells her about the 2017 fire, about the 100-foot ponderosa pine that fell on him right after he pushed a 19-year-old rookie out of the way, about the three guys he lost who were trapped on the other side of the blaze. She doesn’t give him the pitying, wide-eyed look everyone else does, just nods, her dark eyes soft, and says she remembers that fire, remembers watching the thick orange smoke cover the town for three straight weeks, her mom refusing to let her little brother play outside.
The first firework goes off overhead with a deafening boom, painting the inky dark sky bright crimson, and the crowd around them cheers, surging forward to get a better view. Mara stumbles when a group of drunk teens bumps into her from behind, and he reaches out without thinking, his calloused hands wrapping firmly around her waist to steady her. Her hands fly to his broad shoulders to catch herself, and suddenly they’re so close he can smell the peach iced tea she’s been drinking mixed with the faint vanilla of her perfume, the flickering light from the fireworks gilding the edges of her hair. He doesn’t let go. She doesn’t pull away.
“I’ve been asking about you for weeks, you know,” she says, loud enough for only him to hear over the pop and crackle of the fireworks bursting overhead. “The hardware store clerk said you only come in at 7 a.m. on Tuesdays, avoid making eye contact with everyone. I was starting to think you were a ghost.”
He laughs, a real, unforced one, the kind he hasn’t let out in years. “Almost was, for a while.”
The fireworks end a few minutes later, the crowd dispersing, people calling to each other as they head for the exit, crumpled plastic cups and paper plates crunching under their feet. They walk side by side to his beat-up 1998 Ford F-150 parked at the edge of the fairgrounds, their shoulders brushing every few steps. He holds the dented passenger door open for her, and she pauses before climbing in, reaching up to brush her thumb lightly across the scar on his jaw, her touch soft, deliberate.
“I got a bottle of 12-year bourbon on my kitchen counter,” she says, her dark eyes glinting in the glow of the distant fair string lights, smiling. “We can go over the revised grant draft if you want. Or we can skip it entirely.”
He nods, closing the passenger door gently after she climbs in, the metal warm under his hand from sitting in the sun all day. He walks around to the driver’s side, pulls the door open, and slides into the seat, the sound of the fair’s distant country band fading behind them as he turns the key in the ignition.
