dear, I’m sorry. For, you know, the fire and everything.” Tears sprang into her eyes and Sam’s stomach knotted. He didn’t know which reaction he hated worse—the voracious interest or the pity.
“Hazards of the job,” he said, as he always did. “I got off easier than some.”
Dennis rescued him, blowing a whistle to bring the scouts over for their informative tour of the tower.
“Boys,” the scoutmaster said, “this is Mr. Corbett. He’s going to tell you all about his job as a fire spotter, and show you how he watches out for fires so he can keep the forest—and us—safe.”
“Do you have to run down all those stairs to put out the fires?” one skinny boy asked with a hint of awe. He was staying well back from the railing, unlike some of the others. Not everyone liked the heights up there, but they’d never bothered Sam. Heights didn’t scare him. Nothing scared him anymore. He’d already been through the worst and survived. More or less.
“He doesn’t put the fires out himself, stupid,” one of the other boys said with a sneer. “Real firemen do that. He just sits up here with a pair of binoculars and watches.”
“Now Tommy,” Dennis said, with the air of someone who has repeated himself so often, the response was automatic. “We don’t call anyone stupid, do we? And Mr. Corbett’s job is just as important as that of the people who actually put out the fires. In a way, he is a firefighter too.”
Sam tried not to grimace, hearing the echo of his own voice inside his head. That was the same thing he told himself every day. That the job he was doing was vital to the effort; that he was still doing his part, in the only way he still could. It was the only thing that kept him going.
The problem was, he didn’t really believe it, any more than that young scout did.
***
Sam showed the boys around the inside of the tower, and let them each take a turn looking out through the big binoculars in different directions. Most took their turns eagerly, almost hoping to be the one to spot a fire. He told himself not to be angry with the youngsters; to them the prospect of seeing actual flames was an abstract idea, an adventure, not a grim reality. But he could still feel his teeth clench and his shoulders tighten.
Peter, the smallest of the scouts, squinted seriously as he looked through the lens, then pointed out into the forest with one slightly grubby finger. “Mr. Corbett? Who lives down there in that little house?”
Dennis and Sam exchanged glances. There weren’t any residences in that quadrant, and the ranger station was too far away to be seen from the tower.
Sam held out his hand for the glasses. “Let me take a look so I can see what you’re talking about,” he said, expecting something like a large, vaguely house-shaped boulder. Instead, once he’d adjusted the binoculars, he spotted the structure Peter was referring to—except that it wasn’t a house, exactly, more like a modern gypsy caravan on wheels, parked in a clearing in the forest.
“Huh,” he said. “Just somebody camping, I guess.” Or someone who had wandered into the woods and gotten lost. That happened occasionally too. Out of habit, he swung the glasses around to check out the surrounding area, and felt his hands grow clammy at the sight of a column of gray and white smoke, shooting up less than a mile from where the caravan stood.
Dragging a harsh breath in through scarred lungs, he turned to Dennis and said quietly, “You need to take the boys down now. Right now.”
Dennis’s eyes widened but he didn’t ask any questions, just called the scouts and the two moms together, had them say a quick thank-you to Sam, and hustled them out the door and down the stairs. As soon as the last pair of sneakers was on the top step, Sam ran over to the two-way radio.
“Dispatch, come in,” he said. “It’s Sam. I’ve got a smoke.” He quickly relayed the coordinates, as well as the information that there might be a civilian in harm’s way.
The dispatcher called it in, sending the first response team on their way, then switched back to Sam and asked a few more questions about what he’d seen.
“So, this caravan you spotted,” the dispatcher said. “Did you see anyone near it?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Whoever it was could have been inside, or out hiking.”