Earl Hogarth, 62, spent 28 years manning fire spotter towers in the Lolo National Forest before he hung up his binoculars in 2019. He still carries a scar on his right forearm from a falling branch during the 2017 blaze, and a heavier, invisible scar from 2001, when he missed a small, fast-spreading flare east of Missoula that killed two rookie crew members. He’s lived alone in a one-room cabin 12 miles outside town ever since, only coming in once a week for propane, coffee, and the Tuesday VFW bingo night he’s attended religiously for 15 years, even though he almost never speaks to anyone there.
It’s mid-October, the tail end of a brutal wildfire season that left 12,000 acres of the forest charred, and the VFW hall smells like fried cheese curds, pine cleaner, and lukewarm Pabst Blue Ribbon. Earl’s slouched in his usual corner table, the one with a wobbly leg he shimmed with a folded beer coaster three years back, dauber in one hand, half-empty beer in the other, when the chair across from him scrapes back.
He tenses up immediately, ready to grab his stuff and leave. The only reason he picks this table is that it’s usually empty, far enough from the rowdy group of post-9/11 vets by the bar that he doesn’t have to make small talk. But then he looks up, and it’s a woman he hasn’t seen before. Mid-to-late 50s, wavy auburn hair streaked with gray pulled back in a loose braid, flannel shirt unbuttoned over a faded Neil Young tee, work boots caked with mud, a smudge of blue ink on the left side of her jaw. She’s holding a chipped ceramic mug of spiced cider, and she gives him a lopsided grin when she catches him staring. “Sorry, every other table’s full. I promise I won’t yell if I get bingo before you.”
Earl grunts, nods, looks back at his card. He’s not used to people talking to him unprompted. He can smell her perfume over the cheese curds and beer: vanilla and cedar, like the soap his mom used to buy when he was a kid. When she leans across the table to grab the extra green dauber sitting an inch from his left hand, her knuckles brush his. His skin is rough, calloused from years of climbing tower ladders and splitting firewood, hers are softer but crisscrossed with tiny paper cuts, the kind you get from sorting old books. He flinches like he’s been burned, and she pulls back fast, apologetic. “My bad, I should’ve asked.”
He shakes his head, mumbles that it’s fine. He can feel his face heating up, which is stupid, he’s a grown man, he’s fought fires, carried guys out of burning woods, but a pretty woman’s hand brushing his makes him feel like a 16-year-old kid on his first date. She introduces herself as Maren, the new part-time librarian at the downtown branch, moved to town three months prior to help her daughter and 17-year-old grandson, who’s recovering from a skiing accident. She says she’s never been to bingo before, got dragged by a coworker who bailed ten minutes in to pick up her sick kid.
Earl finds himself talking, first just one word answers, then longer. He tells her about the wild bees he keeps in hives behind his cabin, how he plants clover every spring to feed them, sells the honey at the farmers market on weekends when he’s feeling up to being around people. She says she’s been looking for local, unprocessed honey for the library’s weekly story time, the little kids go crazy for honey sticks, and the store-bought stuff tastes like corn syrup.
The bingo caller yells out B-12, and Earl glances down at his card, realizes he’s got a full row. He stands up, voice gruffer than he means it to be, yells “Bingo.” The room cheers, the guy running the game hands him a $75 gift card to the local feed store, which he’d already been planning to use for clover seed, plus the random door prize: two tickets for the fall foliage train ride up the Bitterroot Valley, leaving next Saturday at 10 a.m.
He almost leaves the tickets on the table. He hasn’t done anything “fun” that wasn’t hiking or working with his bees in 20 years, and the thought of spending two hours in a crowded train car with strangers makes his chest tight. But then Maren leans in, her shoulder brushing his, warm through the flannel of his shirt, and she’s got that same lopsided grin, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’ve been trying to get tickets to that for weeks, but they sold out in two days. My grandson bailed on me last minute to go to a high school football game. You gonna use those, or you gonna let ‘em go to waste?”
Earl hesitates. The old guilt nags at him, the voice in his head that says he doesn’t get to have nice things, that if he lets himself be happy something bad will happen, like it did in 2001. But then he looks at the bee-shaped silver ring she’s twisting around her left index finger, the smudge of ink still on her jaw, the way she’s holding her cider mug like she’s nervous he’ll say no. He nods. “Yeah. We can go. I’ll pick you up at 9, by the library.”
He shows up 10 minutes early next Saturday, his beat up 2008 Ford F-150 washed for the first time in six months, a jar of his wildflower honey wrapped in brown paper sitting on the passenger seat. Maren’s waiting on the library steps, holding a cloth tote bag, wearing a thick wool coat and a knit hat with a pom-pom on top. She hands him a jar of homemade peach jam when he gets out of the truck, says she canned it back in August, peaches from her cousin’s orchard in Washington.
The open-air train car is half full, most people are couples in their 50s and 60s, holding thermoses of coffee or hot cocoa. They sit next to each other on the wooden bench, and when the train lurches forward around the first bend, Maren’s shoulder presses into his, and she doesn’t move away. The trees on the side of the mountain are bright red and gold, dotted with patches of dark green pine that survived the summer fires, and the air smells like wood smoke and crisp fall air.
They don’t talk about the 2001 fire. They don’t talk about the wife he left three months after it happened, or the husband Maren lost to a heart attack three years prior. They talk about bees, about books, about the way the valley looks from 2,000 feet up, about the little kid at story time who tried to eat an entire jar of glue last week. When Maren points out a red-tailed hawk circling above the treeline, her hand brushes his where it’s resting on the bench between them, and this time he doesn’t flinch. He laces his fingers through hers, slow, like he’s waiting for her to pull away. She doesn’t. She squeezes his hand once, soft, and leans her head on his shoulder for half a second before she sits back up, grinning at him like she’s just pulled off the best bingo win of all time.
The train rounds another bend, and the whole valley spreads out below them, the charred patches of forest already sprouting tiny green shoots, the Clark Fork river glinting silver in the midday sun.
