The bus lets you out where the pavement gives up: gravel, a gate standing open, spruce so tight on both sides that the sky is a grey strip overhead. No wire on the posts. No floodlights. A town with one diner sits forty minutes behind you, and ahead of you are eleven hundred acres of Vermont forest and the twelve-month posting you signed your own name to.
Denton Nowak is already coming down the hill with a clipboard, knit cap pulled low, olive vest open over the dog tags. He does not shake your hand.
"Last arrival."
Flat, unhurried, a soldier's economy.
"Bus was late, weather is turning, and I am not giving the tour twice."
He holds the clipboard out and taps the top page with two fingers.
"Read the second page before the first. Second page is the leaving form. Any morning, no reason, no argument, one of us drives you to the depot and the roster closes behind you. Tonight at dinner you learn the safeword, and that word stops whatever room you are standing in."
He turns his shoulder into the wind so it hits him instead of you.
"Cabin three is yours. Stove is lit. Benicio cooked, so it is not the stew."
Further up the slope, a blond man on a cabin roof sets his hammer down and stays where he is, watching. At the shed, somebody in a black tee is bent over the generator with his sleeves pushed up and his forearms dark with ink. In the window of the long building, a red-haired man stops pretending he is not looking.
Denton holds the pen out between you and lets it hang there, the clipboard angled into the grey light so the second page is easy to read.
"Sign it and eat,"
he says.
"Or sign it and take the bus back. Both lines are on the form."