by Mark Spragg
Einar folded the magnifying glass against the wall and a coyote started up with a series of high-pitched skirlings. They both stared at the window until the animal was done, then he closed the book and held it against his thighs. “I’ll sell this goddamn place and move into the county home before I’ll see you drop out of college to nurse me.”
She placed a hand on the blue-and-red dragon wrapping his forearm from wrist to elbow, but it felt too intimate a gesture and she brought her hand back to her lap. “Is that why you called your sister? Because you don’t think I can take care of you?”
“Marin’s had some trouble. That’s all there was to it.”
He stared at her, unblinking, and she’d always wondered what he saw when he looked so long, searching her face. “I was frightened,” she said.
“Of what?”
She walked to the window, leaning against the wall to the side of the frame. She hooked her hair behind her ears. “The noise.” Her reflection in the glass made her uneasy, so she stepped away. “It was like what Paul told me about the summer he worked on an oil rig. All clank and strain. That’s what Rhode Island sounded like.”
She raised the bottom sash higher and the room swamped with cooler air and she came back to the bed, bending over him. She pushed a fist into the mattress on either side of his hips. “I’m sorry if you think I wasted the money you gave me.”
When that was all she said he expected her to kiss him good night, but she just held her face close, taking shallow, steady breaths.
His eyes stung and he closed them, the memories of when he was her age and gone from home for the first time coming up clearly. The weeks at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the loud, drunken nights in Columbia or Charlotte, the constant soul-grating wail of his thousands of new neighbors, like a dental drill in his sleep, but he’d had Mitch and a red-haired boy named Ferguson from Colorado Springs to share the dislocation when the panic set in. When the press of the overly treed horizons and the too-wet air made it hard to breathe, he had friends who could help conjure the wind and distance and silence of the Rockies, and then they were shipped on to Inchon.
“Have we got any ice cream?” he asked.
She smiled, shaking her head, and when her hair came loose and fell against his cheeks she straightened up and scooped the hair away from her face. “I’ll get some tomorrow.”
He opened his eyes. “I don’t want you to worry about what I think. About you not going back to school.”
“I’m not worried.”
“I believe you are, just a little. And I don’t want you to worry about Marin, either.”
She looked down to where her hands were clasped at her waist, letting them swing free, for a moment imagining he might guess how often she’s prayed he’ll die all at once, like a young person does, without expecting it. She doesn’t want him to suffer like Mitch had, slipping away with no last statement of regret or summation, no parting smile or gasp, just a single weak exhalation. She’d been sitting with him in his little cabin, and when it was clear that he was gone she’d walked outside, staring into the vaulted sky, turning slowly under the silent witness of Cassiopeia, Andromeda, every point of light where she expected it to be in its seasonal progression, Orion with his shield tilted against the earth as though to safeguard the heavens from our accrual of grief. She’d expected some sort of revelation, but there was none. The night sky remained free of circumstance.
“You need a glass of water?”
“I’m better off if I go to bed thirsty.”
“All right.” She moved the chair back against the wall. “My mom said that if I wouldn’t go to school, she would.”
“When did all this happen?”
“She said she’s going to take classes this summer over in Sheridan. She’ll be a nurse’s assistant.”
“That’s not something I’d want to do, but good for her.” He switched off the nightstand lamp and they waited for their eyes to adjust. “We both know I haven’t paid for squat,” he said. “Your airline tickets were the only thing I even helped with.”
“I’m going to call Paul now.” She moved to the doorway and stopped, standing silently, and when he reached to turn the light back on she added, “I should’ve told you I wanted to come home, but I didn’t want you to think I was a quitter. I didn’t want to think of myself like that.”
He brought his hand back from the lamp switch, staring into the darkness. But he couldn’t distinguish her silhouette, and then he heard her walking evenly in the hall and the front door open and close. He tried to remember if she’d wished him a good night.
“Don’t think I believe it was only the noise,” he whispered. “Not for one single minute.”
Three
CRANE STEPPED OUT of the county cruiser and eased the door shut, holding the handle up to avoid the metallic click of the latch. He’d turned off the radio and headlights at the highway, idling in under a moon three-quarters full, and now stood hesitantly in that just sufficient light and when it occurred to him tipped his silver-belly stockman’s hat off, reaching in through the open window to place it on the seat. The hat attracts moonlight like cumulus, and he wondered what else he hadn’t considered that might get him killed. He studied the timber at the edge of the clearing for threat but saw only a dove-colored border of shadow, pendulate and hypnotic, and had to lean unexpectedly into the windowframe to keep his balance, focusing on the shotgun in its bracket between the seats, until his sudden rise of vertigo quieted.
He raked a hand back through his dark hair, wondering if blond or white-headed sheriffs made better targets in nighttime shootings, promising himself to look on the Department of Justice website when he got back to the office.
He unsnapped the leather strap over the hammer of his pistol and lifted it out of the holster, holding it at his side. It seemed heavier than it should, pulling on his shoulder, and he switched it to his right hand. Sweat ran down his ribs and he plucked his shirt away so it wouldn’t stick.
In his experience violence arrives when it wants to, and if it wants you it’ll find you, just like lightning. It’s the frail woman hardly noticed, quietly nursing a glass of wine until the wine spills and she has a steak knife in her ex-husband’s new wife, or the big, sorry boy out of the oilfields gone apeshit in a fight, or the fresh butchery of a car wreck, and this deal tonight might not be anything at all. He was stalling. So far this was only a call-in from Denise Rickert about something that didn’t sound like it should, but then Denise has lived thirty-nine years with old Bobby Rickert and never said hi, bye or kiss my ass about that arrangement, so whatever else she might be, it sure as hell isn’t prone to complaint.
The side of the trailer reflected dully in the moonlight, and he stood there for another minute. There was a lamp on in what he imagined was the bedroom, but the orange drapes were drawn. A radio was playing country music, faintly, though it wasn’t a song he remembered having heard.
He stepped out of the gravel and into the overgrown meadow grass to the side of the drive so his footfalls wouldn’t give him away. His heart raced as he thumbed back the pistol’s hammer, taking in three deep breaths. That’s the part he always forgets. To breathe.
He stopped next to the trailer, just below its wooden stoop, and breathing wasn’t a problem anymore. He sucked at the air as though he’d gained altitude, feeling the heat against his face and smelling the jumble of what remained: the sharp, acrid scent of burned chemicals and plastics, the sweet, sewer reek of propane, all of it seemingly extinguished by gallons of cat piss. And tonight there was something else, the odor of a branding, of burned hair and flesh.
He pulled the gas mask from his service belt and fit it over his head, thinking of the rookie deputy who got charged up last year and stormed a lab like this, inhaling enough of the fumes to have him drawing benefits from the county for the rest of his sicker-than-shit life.
At least there wasn’t a dog. Not yet, that is. He’d hate to have to kill a dog.
; The door stood ajar and he pushed it back slowly with the barrel of the pistol, holding it up between himself and whatever was going to come at him. Nothing did. “Sheriff’s office,” he called, but most of that announcement echoed inside the mask.
The sound of his breathing filled his ears when he stepped through the doorway and he clenched his teeth. There was enough light from the bedroom that he didn’t need a flashlight, and he swung the pistol to his left and right, and when there was nothing but the still-smoldering squalor of the front room and kitchen he moved to the windows, lifting them open in their aluminum frames, keeping the pistol trained down the hallway, thinking, That’s the sweet thing about trailers, no surprise in the layout. He started toward the back as quickly as he could without stumbling in the debris, and when he reached the bedroom there was just the light on the nightstand where the radio was playing. He sat on the bed with both arms hanging between his knees. His shirt was stuck to his chest and across his shoulders, and when he eased the mask off the sweat ran into his eyes. He dragged a forearm across his face and switched off the radio. His hands were shaking and he slumped forward and stayed there until he steadied. Then he laid the pistol on the orange bedcover and took the handheld radio from his belt. He mopped at his forehead again before he called the office, and Starla’s voice came through cheap and tinny.
“This is Crane.”
“Hey, boss.” She snapped her gum, and he tried to remember if he’d ever heard her say anything with her mouth clear.
“I need an ambulance out here. I need one right now.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, but there’s someone here who isn’t.”
“Oh, God.”
“Let’s just stick with being glad it’s not me.” He heard her hit the speed dial for the hospital on the office console.
“You still out on Cabin Creek?” The gum snapping was like static.
“I’m in that trailer Jake Croonquist put out for his foreman. Where the road turns to gravel past mile marker twenty-four.”
He listened as she repeated the information to the dispatcher at the hospital, setting the handheld down by the pistol, shaking his left arm over the side of the bed. It felt like it had gone to sleep.
“You need me to locate one of your deputies?”
He grabbed up the handheld. “Say again?”
“Do you need backup?”
“I’m all right.” He shook his arm harder. “Have those boys pick up Dan Westerman on their way out.”
“Oh, my God, Crane. Tell me this isn’t something you had to do.”
“Somebody else did it before I got here.”
“But you’re sure?”
“I believe I’d know if I killed a man.”
“I mean, are you sure you need the coroner?”
“Jesus Christ, Starla.”
“Oh, God.”
“I wish you’d stop with that.”
“You want me to call Jean?”
“No,” he said, “but I’m going to need a DCI unit before I can leave.”
“Is that everything?”
“I guess Jean’ll see I’m okay when I get home.”
“Roger that.”
He sat for a minute longer, then pulled a pair of latex gloves from his shirt pocket and snapped them on. He pushed against his knees to help himself stand, holstering the pistol when he noticed it lying on the bed.
He went back down the hallway, turning on the lights as he found the switches, and stopped in the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. Half a pizza, a carton of Marlboro Lights and three bottles of decent lager from a brewery in Red Lodge, Montana. He twisted the cap off a beer, draining it without taking a breath. He set the empty bottle on the countertop that separated the kitchen from the living room and opened another beer, carrying it to the couch that sat squared against the far wall. The dead man lay curled on the floor at the end of it, with a ruptured propane bottle right in front of him and the rest of the floor strewn with melted and misshapen containers that once held benzene, Freon, white gas and black iodine. The rest of the mess was the tubing and pans, here and there the charred foil discarded from dozens of cards of cold tablets. The TV was turned on its side, next to a fire extinguisher with the pin pulled.
He wedged the beer between the cushions of the couch and knelt by the body. The head, shoulders and chest were badly burned, the flesh puckered, crusted black, frosted with foam from the extinguisher. When he noticed the sweep of blood leaking back toward the wallboard he gently lifted the head out of it, turning the misshapen face toward the light. There was a hole punched in the left temple, and he could feel the lack of skull in his palm, where the bullet had exited at the top of the spine. He lowered the head back into the blood, slumping back on his heels, his hands on his thighs, palms up and smeared.
“Fuck me.” He could smell the beer on his breath when he spoke, and peeled the gloves off.
He worked a billfold out of the dead man’s jeans, and when he heard the ambulance turn off the highway and cut its siren, and then the crunch of tires in the gravel drive, he was sitting on the couch with the wallet in one hand and the beer in the other. “Come on in,” he called.
“Is that Crane?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Dan Westerman stood in the doorway. “You need all of us?”
“We better start with just you.”
Dan stepped in gingerly, lifting a foot to check the sole. “Is it safe?”
“I believe it is, mostly. Just watch where you walk, and I’d hose off when you get back home.”
Dan wore dark green shorts with cargo pockets, a yellow knit shirt, white cotton socks and slip-on Birkenstocks. He held a small green duffel at his side. They were both staring at the body.
“The kids are home for the summer,” he said. “We were up talking when Starla called, and I didn’t have time to change.”
“I’m sorry to get you out here for this.”
Dan stepped to the body and squatted, pulling on a pair of gloves and zipping open the duffel, and Crane closed his eyes against the series of camera flashes, then watched while Dan bagged the hands and examined the bullet wound in the head, finally standing away.
“I’m not going to be able to tell you a whole lot out here.”
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“I thought they were cooking most of this shit in Mexico now and trucking it in. The skin that’s not fried on this poor bastard’s too pale for a Mexican national.”
Crane held up the wallet. “He’s from over in Sheridan.”
“You know him?”
“I know his parents, though now I wish I didn’t. He was only nineteen.”
Dan looked back at the body as if it appeared younger to him. “That’s just getting started.”
“That’s all it is.”
“When I was a kid the most I could get my hands on was Coors beer and weak-ass reefer.” He zipped the duffel shut and lifted it up.
“It’s not like that anymore. We’ve gone miles past that.”
Dan just nodded, still staring down at the body. “Something like this, you might never find out who else was in here.”
Crane struggled out of the couch and walked to the kitchen, taking the last beer from the refrigerator. He lined the second empty next to the other on the counter. “Contaminated evidence,” he explained.
“You all right?”
“No, I’m not.” He leaned against the counter. “Whoever shot this boy’s ruined his own goddamn life too. That’s what I’m thinking.” He sipped the beer. “Whether I find him or not, this here isn’t something you just forget you did.”
“I don’t think I could.” Dan called to the two paramedics standing beside the ambulance and they pulled a gurney from the back, righting it in the gravel. A body bag was folded on top. He took a step into the kitchen so they wouldn’t have to go around him. “You sure you don’t want to keep him out here so the investigation team can have a look?”
Dan turned back to him. “You think something’s wrong with you?”
Crane extended his left arm, drawing the hand into a loose fist. “I’ve got no grip left.”
“That could be a lot of things.”
“Well, it feels like something’s broke, that’s for damn sure, and this here”—he pointed at the dead boy with the hand that held the beer bottle—“is just the kind of thing that can get to a man’s heart.”
Four
AFTER SHE DID the breakfast dishes and Einar said he might soak in the tub, she slipped out past the barn to her studio, thankful to have an hour just to herself. She wedged four mounds of clay onto the worktable and kneaded it to the consistency she preferred, wrapping it in plastic so it wouldn’t dry out. She knew it might be a day or two before she had the time to get back to it.
She was returning to the house, wiping her hands on a scrap of rag, when Paul turned the Rocking M one-ton into the yard. McEban rode with him, filling the passenger side of the cab so completely that it appeared they’d bought the truck a size too small. His arm hung out the window with the hand spread against the door panel, holding himself, as best he could, away from Kenneth, who sat squeezed between the two men. They were pulling a four-horse gooseneck trailer and parked in the shade of the cottonwoods.
She watched from the porch as they stepped the saddled horses out, tying their leadropes off to the trailer, the last of them a rangy bay wearing a packsaddle. The air was grainy with pollen and insects and the settling dust.
“Who’s here?” Einar called from the dining room.
“My fencing crew.”
Kenneth moved among the horses with the seriousness of a newly hired man, careful not to get kicked or cause an accident, but when McEban started toward the house the boy came apart, jostling a shoulder against McEban’s hip and bouncing away, turning back into just an unbullied and sweet-natured kid who’d gotten a good night’s sleep.