C. Box: Free Fire

When she came back with two glasses, he said, “No, not completely.”

“The deal as you describe it makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “They either hire you back or they don’t. From what you tell me, you’ll be operating on your own with no backup and no support. If you get into trouble, you’re on your own. We’re on our own. What is that phrase politicians like to use?”

“Plausible deniability.”

“Right. And how do we know Randy Pope won’t do everythinghe can to undermine you at every turn?”

“I expect him to do that,” Joe said.

She sighed, sipped her wine. “Remember how frustrated you were with the bureaucracy, with fighting against the system? Do you think you could live within it again-do you think it’s changed at all?”

Joe shook his head. “Not a bit.”

“Do we move back to our house?”

“I don’t think so. He never mentioned it. Would you want that?”

“No, although I wouldn’t mind a change of scenery if that meant we could get our lives back.”

Me too , he thought.

“The last time you had to leave us it wasn’t very good,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

When he was assigned temporarily to Jackson, Joe thought. No, it wasn’t very good for them. In fact, his absence and the things that happened with both of them had damaged their marriage.It was only now healing. Time and their joint determinationto right the ship had created scar tissue. But the wound was still there, and would always be there, he supposed.

“I’d want you to come this time,” Joe said. “Bring Sheridan and Lucy every chance you get. It’ll be tough with school and activities, but let’s make sure we stay close and in contact.”

She nodded, thinking it over. “I’ve always wanted to go to Yellowstone, as you know.”

“I know.”

“But we’ve never gone.”

Joe sighed, and found himself staring at the woodstove.

“Are you going to be able to do this?” she asked.

He looked back. “I have to.”

Yellowstone, a place so special and awe-inspiring that after exploring it in 1871, the Hayden Expedition conceived of the original concept of the world’s first national park-a set-aside of 2.2 million acres containing more than ten thousand thermal features, canyons, waterfalls, and wildlife-so no man or corporationcould ever own it. As a boy, Joe had been to Yellowstonedozens of times. Many of his earliest memories were of geysers, mud pots, bears, and tourists. He had once loved the park unlike anywhere else, and announced to his parents he wanted to live there, to fish, hike, and camp for the rest of his life. It was a magical place and he had preferred it to heaven becauseat that age Joe didn’t think there could be trout streams in the clouds.

His father shared his love for the park, which was the reason they vacationed there year after year. Their mutual love for it was one of the few things they ever agreed on, other than the movie Shane . It was the one place, Joe recalled, where his fathercame alive, stopped drinking, and played at being an amateurgeologist-explaining to his two young sons that there were three kinds of thermal features in the world: geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles (steam vents), and Yellowstone featuredthem all. He remembered his father running down a boardwalk in the Upper Geyser Basin-actually running! — and shouting over his shoulder to his boys to follow him becauseOld Faithful itself was about to erupt. It was a place where one could look into the cruel molten heart of the earth itself, and Joe had once done exactly that. Or thought he had. It was in a huge lung-shaped hot pool, the water vivid aquamarine,steam hovering above the calm surface. A shaft of sunlight plunged deep into the pool, which looked so inviting but was nearly two hundred degrees, illuminating bleached-whitebison bones resting on rock shelves as far down as he could see. Bones! And no bottom to the pool; it simply descendedfar past where the sun could reach. For years, he had nightmares about those bones, about falling into the pool, about sinking slowly as the water got hotter and hotter, his bones coming to rest on an outcropping.

His brother loved it too, but in a different way.

But he couldn’t remember Yellowstone without what came next: the darkest period of his young life.

He’d never been back.

He’d attempted to defeat the demons eight years before, when Sheridan was six and Lucy a baby. Joe had borrowed a tent, and their plan was to spend a week camping in Yellowstone,just as he had done when he was a child. He would cook meals over a campfire, and they’d see the sights: Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Lower and Upper Falls. Everythinghad been ahead of them then and nothing seemed daunting.He’d actually looked forward to going back to the park and putting all the bad memories about it behind him for good. But the week before they went, Marybeth discovered she was pregnant,and the early weeks would mean morning sickness and misery. Although she was willing to gut it out, they postponed the trip for later. It was the year they had been assigned the SaddlestringDistrict, a year before violence entered their lives. And never went very far away.

Marybeth was the most practical woman Joe had ever known. She ran the finances for the family, her business, her clients. She could see things clearly. Yet she had not even mentionedthat if he went back to the state-with a raise-their situationwould dramatically improve. That a house in town away from Missy would be within reach.

She looked up and studied his face. He tried not to give his thoughts away. He didn’t succeed.

“You really want to do this, don’t you?”

Joe said nothing.

“You want to get back into it. You want to carry a badge and a gun again, don’t you?”

“I don’t like to be a failure,” he said.

“Stop it. You’re not a failure.”

He let that lie. The last thing he wanted was to make her tell him why he wasn’t a failure. He could counter every argument.

“Joe, what do you want to do?”

There were so many reasons not to accept the offer. Pope. Bureaucracy. The chance, once again, that the evil he encounteredwould affect his family.

But. .

“Yes, I want to do it.”

“Then it’s settled,” Marybeth said. “Call the governor.”

“I love you,” he said.

She reached out and squeezed his arm. “I love you too, Joe.”

“I don’t know why.”

She laughed, said, “Because you want to do good, even when you should know better.”

When the knock came at her door, Sheridan quickly typed “Gotta Go” on her computer screen, ending the stupid IM conversationshe was having with Jarrod Haynes, and turned back to her biology book as if deep in thought. Jarrod, she thought, liked to talk about Jarrod. Too bad she wasn’t as interested in the subject as he was.

“Yes?”

“Can I come in for a minute?”

“Sure, Dad.”

Her father entered and shut the door behind him.

“I tried to use the phone,” he said. “The line was busy. I need to make a call.”

Caught, Sheridan said, “I was on the Internet for a minute.”

“For an hour, you mean.”

“I’m off now.”

“I thought you were studying.”

She gestured to her open book. But she could tell that wasn’t really why he had knocked.

“Sheridan, I want to tell you that the governor offered me a job today. I’m going to be a game warden again, sort of.”

Her first reaction was a mixture of joy and desperation. She was thrilled that her dad had gotten his job back because, well, that’s what he was: a game warden. The game warden, as far as she was concerned. She had been with him many times while he worked, and she knew how dedicated he was.