Page 72 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Do you have a grandmother, Mr. Cade."

He blinks. "Sure."

"Mine is eighty-four and there are buckets in her upstairs hall and she will not discuss moving." I look at him. "The forty-one thousand is a roof and a sill. It has been a roof and a sill for six years. And I would take that roof off her house tonight with my hands before I stand in front of that screen again on Friday and let them put it in front of her."

Bristow Cade says nothing.

He is the host of this program. He has a lanyard and a coat with a network logo on the breast and there are three cameras in this tent, and one of them is on us right now, and he is a man who has said nothing for four seasons and nine episodes and he opens his mouth.

Then Delia Prine says, "Bristow," from somewhere behind him, warmly, the way you would call a dog you like.

And he closes it.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

I go down the mountain in the dark.

It is two and a half miles from the Flat to the north site and then another six down the fire road to base, and I have no light and do not want one. Fifteen days on this ground has put it in my legs. The grade tells me where I am. The sound of the water tells me the rest.

Somewhere behind me a woman is standing in a warm tent holding a caramel.

I do not turn around, and nothing about what I am doing is anything other than a thing done to her, and I keep going anyway, which is the truest sentence available about tonight.

At the switchback above the north site there is a shape standing in the trail.

Bear.

He has the rig on the shoulder mount and the red eye is up and he has run to get ahead of me, which at his size on this grade in the dark is a thing I have opinions about. He is breathing hard. He is the only man on this production who has never asked me to say something again with more energy.

We stand there.

Then Bear takes the rig off his shoulder and lets it down until it hangs at his hip, pointed at the mud, and he steps off the trail into the salal and gives me the whole path.

He does not say anything. He has not said anything in fifteen days.

I go past him.

About forty feet down, I stop, and I say, without turning, "Thank you," and the mountain takes it, and nothing comes back, and I keep walking.

CHAPTER 27

JUNIE

DAY 16

The garland is still up.

That is the first thing at the mouth of the overhang at six in the morning: nine feet of alder curls and stripped-bark stars on a length of paracord, swinging a little in the draft off the gully, over a fire ring with cold ash in it and one sleeping bag instead of two.

His bag went out on the six a.m. transport with him. Somebody came up the hill in the dark and took it and left mine, and rolled his coat, and took that too, and did it all so quietly that I slept through the entire dismantling of my life.

I sit up. I put my boots on. I go down to the site.

The tarp has failed overnight.

Fourteen degrees of temperature swing does that. The lines went slack when the frost came out of the cordage and now the whole north pitch has gone concave and there is a pool of water sitting in it about the size of a bathtub, maybe eighty pounds of it, sagging the fabric down to within three feet of the deck and pulling the ridgeline into a shallow smile.

The shelter under it is still perfect. Every joint he cut is holding. The tarp is the only part of this camp that was ever my job.