Chapter 2: First nights
The deputy’s pickup was an old Ford with torn vinyl seats that smelled of stale cigarettes and pine air freshener. Bode sat in the passenger seat, his orange jumpsuit a glaring flag in the fading afternoon light. They drove away from the station in silence, away from the town’s center, climbing a winding road into the dense woods that flanked the valley.
“Camp’s up here,” the deputy, a man named Gibbs with a weary mustache, finally said. “Five miles out. You’ll get bused down to your assigned station every morning, brought back every night. Weekends, you work community service details in town.”
Bode stared out the window. The trees were a blur of green. He couldn’t stop seeing Jake’s face, the shock in it curdling into guilt. He couldn’t stop hearing his father’s voice: You were supposed to be watching her.
“Rules are simple,” Gibbs droned. “No drugs. No booze. No fighting. Curfew is ten. Lights out at eleven. You leave camp for any reason other than your assigned work, it’s an automatic escape charge. Ten more years, minimum.”
“Why no fence?” Bode heard himself ask. The question had been rattling in his head since the program orientation.
Gibbs snorted, a dry, humorless sound. “Where you gonna go? Your picture’s in every law enforcement database from here to the coast. Your face is on the nightly news if you bolt. No money. No friends. The woods’ll eat you alive in three days. The town…” He shook his head, glancing at Bode. “This is a small place. Everyone knows everyone. A stranger in an orange jumpsuit stickin’ out like a sore thumb? You wouldn’t make it to the county line. It’s not worth trying. So, no fences. Fences are for places people might actually want to leave.”
The logic was cold, undeniable. His prison wasn’t made of chain-link; it was made of faces, of memory, of the sheer, inescapable geography of his own past.
They pulled into a clearing. It wasn’t what Bode had pictured. No towers, no barbed wire coils. It looked like a rundown summer camp. A cluster of weathered, wooden bunkhouses formed a loose circle around a central fire pit, now cold and filled with ash. A larger building with a chipped sign that read ‘MESS’ stood off to one side. The trees pressed in close, their shadows long and deep.
About a dozen men milled around. Some wore the same orange jumpsuits, untied at the waist and hanging open over t-shirts. Others wore county-issue grey sweats. They looked up as the truck rolled in, their eyes tracking the new arrival with a flat, assessing familiarity. No hatred, no welcome. Just evaluation.
Gibbs killed the engine. “Bunkhouse Three. Find an empty cot. Dinner’s in an hour. Don’t start shit.”
Bode climbed out, the crunch of his boots on gravel unnaturally loud. He grabbed the thin, county-issued duffel containing his meager belongings—a change of clothes, toiletries, the paperback novel he’d never finished—and walked towards the indicated building. The other men watched him pass. He kept his eyes forward, the old prison-yard habit kicking in: show no fear, show no interest.
Bunkhouse Three smelled of damp wood, sweat, and disinfectant. Rows of simple cots, maybe fifteen, lined the walls. Most were claimed, made up with military precision or strewn with personal effects—photos tucked into the frame, a well-thumbed deck of cards. He found an empty one near the back, by a window that looked out into the darkening woods. He dropped his duffel.
“Fresh meat.”
The voice came from the cot next to his. A man lay on his back, arms behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He was probably in his forties, with a shaved head and a web of tattoos covering his thick forearms.
“Guess so,” Bode said, sitting on the edge of his cot. The springs groaned.
“Donovan, right?” the man said, still not looking at him. “Heard you were coming. I’m Manny.”
“Bode.”
“Firehouse kid. That’s your old man running the show, ain’t it? Captain Vince.”
The news had traveled. Of course it had. Bode just nodded, feeling exposed.
Manny finally turned his head. His eyes were intelligent, weary. “Tough break. Working for Daddy. Rather be digging ditches.”
“Yeah,” Bode said, because it was true.
Manny sat up in one fluid motion. “Word of advice? This camp… it runs on one rule. Do your time, do your work, go home. Don’t borrow trouble. Don’t lend none. The woods look pretty, but they ain’t your friends. And this town…” He gave a slow smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “This town is a minefield for someone like you. Everyone’s got a memory. Everyone’s got an opinion. You just walk careful, brother. Real careful.”
Before Bode could answer, a sharp whistle cut through the bunkhouse. “Chow!”
The men filed out. Dinner was a utilitarian affair: lumpy mashed potatoes, over-steamed green beans, a slab of meatloaf gray at the edges. The meal was consumed with a focused silence. Bode took a seat at the end of a long table, keeping to himself. He caught snippets of conversation—complaints about the day’s work detail, speculation about a transfer, a dark joke about the meatloaf’s origins. It was familiar, this institutional soundtrack. He could have been back in the mess hall at Fairweather Correctional.
As he was scraping his plate into the slop bucket, a shadow fell over him. He looked up.
Vince stood there, still in his station blues, a heavy canvas bag in his hand. He’d driven up from the town. The murmurs in the mess hall dipped, then resumed at a lower pitch. Captain Vince visiting camp wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t casual.
“Walk with me,” Vince said, his tone leaving no room for debate.
Bode followed him outside, into the cool, pine-scented twilight. They walked away from the buildings, towards the tree line, where the last of the sun gilded the tops of the firs. Vince stopped, set the canvas bag down, and pulled out a smaller, familiar duffel. Bode’s personal bag from before. From home.
“Your mother packed this,” Vince said, his voice gruff. “Clothes. Your old boots. Some books she thought you might want.”
Bode took the bag. It felt heavy with unspoken sentiment. “Thanks.”
Vince didn’t acknowledge it. He stared out into the gathering dark. “Saw Jake Miller at the station after the call. Looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
Bode’s grip tightened on the duffel’s strap.
“You two were tight,” Vince continued, probing the wound with surgical detachment. “Before. He was at the house all the time. With you. With Riley.” He said her name, and it hung between them, a crystalline, painful thing. “He visited her grave every week for a year. Brought her those yellow wildflowers she liked.”
Bode felt the world tilt. He hadn’t known that. The image of Jake, alone at his sister’s headstone, was a fresh twist of the knife. “He was a good friend,” Bode managed, the lie tasting like poison.
Vince turned to look at him, his eyes narrow in the dim light. “Was he? Because he looks at you now like he’s guilty of something. And you look at him like you want to put him through a wall. What happened between you two?”
The directness was a battering ram. All the easy deflection he’d learned in prison evaporated. This was his father. “Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit.” Vince took a step closer. “This isn’t the yard, Bode. This is my firehouse. That’s my crew. If there’s history there that’s gonna blow up in my face, I need to know. Now.”
The impulse to scream it all rose in Bode’s throat—the secret relationship, the tangled loyalties, the fatal distraction by the river. The truth was a weapon, and he could use it right now to shatter the perfect image of Jake, to make someone else share the unbearable weight.
But he saw his mother’s face, imagined her learning it all in this horrible, public way. He saw his father’s world, already cracked, crumbling to dust. The words turned to ash on his tongue.
“It’s just old stuff, Dad,” Bode said, forcing his voice to be steady. “From before. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Vince studied him for a long, hard moment. He didn’t believe him. But he also saw the wall, solid and final. He gave a curt, frustrated nod. “Keep it that way. It doesn’t matter.” He turned to go, then paused. “The boots. They’re your old pair from when you did that wilderness survival course. The good ones. She remembered.”
Then he was walking back to his truck, a solid silhouette against the lights of the mess hall.
Bode stood alone as full night settled over the camp. A few stars pierced the canopy of branches. From the bunkhouses, he heard the low rumble of a radio, a burst of laughter, the sound of a man coughing. It was a kind of freedom. He could walk right now. Just step into those trees.
But Gibbs was right. Where would he go? Back to a home that wasn’t his anymore? To a town that knew his sins but not his reasons? To a grave he was too much of a coward to visit?
He hefted the two duffel bags and walked back to Bunkhouse Three. Inside, men were settling in for the night, reading, writing letters, staring at the ceiling. Manny was polishing a pair of boots with a reverence that seemed out of place.
Bode sat on his cot and pulled the familiar duffel from his mother onto his lap. He unzipped it. On top of the folded clothes was a thick paperback—East of Eden. His copy. A faded bookmark was still tucked about halfway through. Beneath it, he found the boots. They were scarred and worn, the leather soft. As he lifted them out, something fluttered to the floor.
A photograph.
He bent to pick it up. It was a snapshot, curled at the edges. Him and Riley, maybe five years ago. They were on the dock at Silver Lake, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. She was laughing, her hair flying wild. He was looking at her, not the camera, a dumb, happy grin on his face. He’d forgotten that version of himself entirely.
His throat closed. He turned the photo over. On the back, in his mother’s precise handwriting, was a single line.
Remember you are loved.
The words were a physical blow. He sat there, gripping the edges of the photo, the noise of the bunkhouse fading to a distant buzz. The guilt was a cold stone in his belly. The anger at Jake was a hot coal. His father’ distrust was a wall of ice.
And in the center of it all, this small, paper-thin truth. Remember you are loved.
He carefully slid the photograph between the pages of the book. He placed the book and the boots under his cot. He lay back, hands behind his head, staring at the knots in the wooden ceiling above him. The camp was quiet now, just the creak of cots and the sigh of the wind in the pines. No fences. No handcuffs. Just the vast, inescapable prison of his own life, waiting for him when the sun came up.
Just the vast, inescapable prison of his own life, waiting for him when the sun came up.
It arrived too early, gray and cold. A bell clanged outside the bunkhouse, jerking Bode from a thin, dream-riddled sleep. For a disorienting second, he thought he was back in his cell at Fairweather, the steel toilet and the crack in the ceiling his only landmarks. Then he smelled pine resin and mildew, heard the groans of other men, and reality solidified, heavy as a wet blanket.
He pulled on the clothes from his mother’s duffel—soft, worn jeans, a plain grey henley. They smelled faintly of their old laundry detergent, a scent so violently familiar it made his chest ache. He laced up the scarred boots, feeling the ghost of his younger, hopeful self in the fit. The photograph was tucked safely in the book, out of sight but pressing against his mind.
The mess hall was loud with the clatter of trays and the low din of exhausted morning conversation. Steam rose from a metal trough of scrambled eggs that had the texture and color of pale yellow packing peanuts. Bode loaded a plate, grabbed a mug of bitter coffee, and scanned the room for a pocket of empty space.
He found a spot at the end of a table where two other guys in orange were shoveling food in silence. He sat, his back to the wall, an old habit. He focused on the eggs, forcing them down. Fuel. That’s all this was.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in. And then the cat puked it back up.”
The voice was a low, oily drawl directly behind his left ear. Bode’s shoulders locked. He knew that voice. It lived in the same mental file as the worst sounds of his life: the river’s rush, the cell door slamming, the flatline tone on a hospital monitor.
He didn’t turn. He took another bite of egg.
A man slid onto the bench opposite him, moving with a languid, reptilian calm. He was maybe forty, with sharp, hungry features and eyes the color of dirty ice. A jagged scar bisected his right eyebrow. Bode knew the story behind it: a disagreement over a gambling debt, settled with a broken soup can.
Carver.
“Donovan,” Carver said, smiling with just his front teeth. He picked up a plastic fork and tapped it lightly against his own tray. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Heard a rumor you were in the county. Didn’t believe it. Thought you’d be smart enough to stay gone.”
Bode finally looked at him. “Believe it.”
“Oh, I do now.” Carver’s eyes traveled over Bode’s face, down to the orange jumpsuit tied around his waist. “Firefighter program. That’s cute. Community service. Redeeming your poor, lost soul.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a confidential murmur that carried no warmth. “How’s that working out for you? Playing hero for Daddy?”
“What do you want, Carver?”
“Catch up. Reminisce.” Carver’s smile vanished. “Think about little Robbie. Remember him? Skinny kid. Eighteen years old, first time inside. Cried every night for a week.”
Bode’s hand tightened around his plastic fork. He saw Robbie’s face, all frightened eyes and acne, trembling in the bottom bunk. He saw him later, seizing on the concrete floor, white foam on his blue lips, after the synthetic shit Carver had smuggled in reacted with his meds.
“I remember.”
“Course you do.” Carver nodded slowly. “You remember what you did after. How you went running to the COs. How you pointed your finger. Said it was me.”
“It was you.”
“And Robbie? He lived. Didn’t he?” Carver’s voice was a razor now. “A little brain damage, they said. But he lived. And I got two years added to my bit. In the SHU. You know what that’s like, Donovan? Twenty-three hours a day in a concrete box because you decided to be a fucking Boy Scout?”
Bode said nothing. The noise of the mess hall seemed to fade, narrowing to a tunnel between him and Carver’s pale, furious eyes.
“I did my time. All of it.” Carver placed his palms flat on the table. “I’m out. On this program. Trying to get right, just like you.” He didn’t blink. “But some debts don’t get erased by good behavior. Some things, a man remembers.”
He pushed himself up from the bench, the plastic fork snapping in his hand. He dropped the pieces onto Bode’s tray, right on top of the congealed eggs.
“So you walk soft here, Donovan. You watch your back on the line. And you remember.” He leaned down again, his breath smelling of cheap coffee and something metallic. “Fire is a dangerous business. Accidents happen all the time.”
The words hung in the air, a promise written in poison. Carver straightened up, his smile returning as if he’d just commented on the weather, and sauntered away, merging with the line of men shuffling toward the transport buses.
Bode sat frozen, the broken plastic fork pieces stark against the yellow-gray of his eggs. Robbie’s face, waxy and still on the cell floor, flashed behind his eyes. The SHU. Solitary confinement was a psychological excavation he’d narrowly avoided himself, but he’d heard the stories from those who emerged broken, speaking to ghosts in the corners of rooms. Carver had done two years of that. Because of him.
He pushed his tray away, his appetite replaced by a cold, metallic fear that lived deeper than the guilt. This changed the calculus entirely. The suffocating town, his father’s disdain, Jake’s guilty eyes—that was a personal hell he’d been prepared to endure for a clean record. But Carver? Carver was a professional inmate with a long memory and a taste for creative payback. Accidents happen all the time on a fire line. A misdirected axe, a sudden backdraft, a collapsing floor. Possibilities unfolded in his mind, each one a plausible, fatal mistake.
He took Carver’s threat seriously. It just meant he needed to speed up his time frame of getting transferred the fuck outta here.
The thought was a frantic drumbeat in his skull as he boarded the bus back to his father’s station. He stared out the grimy window, watching the familiar, hated landmarks of his hometown blur past. He wasn’t ever meant to work the program here. He’d made it clear to his lawyer, a fresh-faced idealist named Amy with a diploma so new the ink probably still smudged. She was a newbie to the practice, drowning in a public defender’s caseload. She didn’t know what she was doing, and that was half the reason Bode got six years for an attempted robbery with no one injured and no real proof it had been him other than a few eyewitnesses that could have been proven inaccurate. Bode had done it, a desperate, blurry decision in a snow-covered parking lot two states away, but he could have gotten away with it. Should have. His lawyer’s inexperience was also why his latest parole hearing went to shit despite the convenience store owner, Mr. Patel, telling the judge he wanted Bode to have a second chance, that the boy who’d held the shaking tire iron seemed more scared than dangerous.
It didn’t matter though. The procedural failures, the bad luck, the stacked years—it was just noise now. Bode just had to get out of this town, now more than ever.
The bus deposited him at the station’s rear entrance. The shift was in full swing, the rhythms of a working firehouse creating a wall of sound and movement that felt separate from him. He was a ghost in orange, assigned to the shadows and the grime. He collected his cleaning supplies without a word, the ammonia smell biting his nostrils, and retreated to the public restrooms off the main apparatus floor.
He was halfway through scrubbing the stubborn, calcified ring inside the second toilet bowl when the door creaked open behind him. He assumed it was Lopez, or maybe Greer, coming to check on him or assign another grim task.
“Bode?”
The voice was a whisper, thin and cracked, a sound he hadn’t heard in three years except in the punishing clarity of memory. It stopped his hand mid-scrub. The brush dripped onto the tile.
He turned, slowly, still crouched on the cold floor.
Eleanor Donovan stood in the doorway of the public bathroom, one hand pressed to her mouth. She looked smaller, as if some essential architecture inside her had slowly collapsed. Her blonde hair, always so neatly styled, was pulled back in a loose, careless ponytail, streaks of gray he didn’t remember framing a face that was all sharp angles and shadowed eyes. She wore a simple, faded sweatshirt and jeans.
Vince had tried to convince her to wait ‘til Bode earned visiting rights so they didn’t get Bode into any more trouble, a write-up or something. But she couldn’t wait any longer. It was written in every trembling line of her.
“Mom,” he said. The word was rusted, disused. It shattered the clinical distance he’d been clinging to since he stepped off the transport van.
She took a shuddering step into the room, her eyes drinking him in with a desperate, hungry sorrow—the orange jumpsuit, the rubber gloves, the brush in his hand, the harsh lines of his face that were no longer her boy’s. A small, wounded sound escaped her.
“I thought you were dead,” she breathed, the words catching. “Because you hadn’t come back. I hadn’t heard a word from you in three years. Not a call. Not a letter. Nothing.”
The raw truth of it, the sheer terror he’d inflicted by vanishing, hit him with the force of a physical blow. He’d been so consumed by his own guilt, his own running, that he’d never let himself picture this: his mother, in this kitchen or that living room, waiting for a phone that never rang, jumping at every knock, slowly convincing herself the only reason for such absolute silence was that the world had taken what remained of her children.
He dropped the brush into the bucket with a dull splash and stood up, peeling off the yellow gloves. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said, the apology utterly insufficient, a pebble dropped into a canyon of pain.
She closed the distance between them in two quick steps. She didn’t hug him. She just reached up, her hands cold and delicate, and cupped his face, her thumbs tracing the new hollows under his cheekbones, the unfamiliar stubble. She was searching for her son in the face of this stranger.
“Look at you,” she whispered, her eyes welling over. “Just look at you.”
From the doorway behind her, a figure appeared, blocking the light. Vince. His expression was stormy, a mix of frustration and a deeper, helpless anguish. He’d followed her, knowing he couldn’t stop her, and now he was witnessing the private fracture of his wife’s last remaining hope.
“Eleanor,” Vince said, his voice low. “You can’t be here. This is a violation. They could send him back.”
“Let them,” she said, not taking her eyes off Bode’s face. Her voice gained a sliver of steel he remembered. “Let them try and take him from me again. I need to see him, Vince. I need to know he’s real.”
Bode stood perfectly still under her touch, a statue of shame and grief. The chemical stink of the cleaner, the damp chill of the bathroom, his mother’s tears on his skin—it was all too much, a sensory overload that short-circuited every defense he had. He was no longer an inmate in a program. He was just a boy who had broken his mother’s heart and had nowhere to hide from the wreckage.