Bone Fire

by Mark Spragg

  “I won’t tell anybody.”

  There was the hollow drumming of a sage grouse beating its wings against a downed cottonwood.

  “I know there’s you and Uncle Paul and my mom, but if I’m going to turn out okay it’s mostly because McEban’s watching out for me.” He dropped his hands away from her. “Right here’s perfect.”

  She reined the horse in and he slid to the ground, pulling his T-shirt over his head, stumbling, waving an arm to right his balance, still gripping the white shirt as though it were the limp body of something he’d snatched out of the dark.

  “You truly are a little shithead,” she said.

  “It’ll be fun.”

  His smile flashed in the moonlight, and he sat down in the graveled apron at the edge of the creek, tugging at his boots.

  “You told me we were just going riding.”

  “And it’s not a secret.” He was peeling his socks off. “You can tell anybody you know how much fun it is.”

  She looked at the creek, where it deepened into a long pool of flat water, edging the southern crescent of the meadow. “Who do you think I’m going to tell I went swimming in the middle of the night?”

  He was on his feet again, unbuckling his belt. “Spencer likes it too,” he said. “Uncle Paul and I swam him last summer.”

  “At night?”

  He nodded. “You can ask him.”

  She looked to the water once more and then slid down beside him and they piled their clothes on the smooth stones, and when all he said about her nakedness was, “You’re really, really white” she swung back onto the horse, pulling him up after her.

  He was wriggling, twisting left and right to look past her, his knees thumping the backs of her thighs. “Put him in there.” He pointed at the headwater of the pool.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “It’s easy.” He turned, shaking his hand toward the broad flash of rapids where the pool emptied. “That’s where we come out. It’s only cold the first time.”

  By the third trip through she felt as if she were shining, lit from within, and Kenneth hung on tight as the horse fell from under them, swimming, and they floated behind and above him in the sound of churning water and their laughter, his arms encircling her, their legs paddling away.

  “Can we go again?” he asked.

  The horse was standing in the tailwaters, blowing hard, water streaming into the shallows, and the pull of gravity had fallen upon them both again, feeling newly invented.

  “Just once?” she asked. He was slippery against her. “How about as many times as you want?”

  His smile went wild and he dropped his hands to her hips as she reined the old horse around toward the head of the pool.

  She was cool and relaxed as she slipped into bed, and Paul woke, smiling as the boy had smiled. He swept his hair away from his eyes, listening while she told him where she’d been.

  “You’re still an asshole,” she said.

  He lay back against the pillow. “I know I am.” He yawned. “Did he get a little boner?”

  “Yeah, he did.” She turned and settled back in against him.

  “He got one with me too.” She could feel his breath on her shoulder, on the back of her neck. “He’s too little for it to mean anything,” he said. “It just feels good.”

  “I know,” she whispered, and pulled his arm around her and held his hand open against her belly, her eyes shut, slipping away into sleep as though adrift in clear water.

  Eight

  WHEN HE WAS UP to speed, with the windows down and the swirl of summer air plucking at his shirt, he cracked open a Bud. He let a car pass, and when there wasn’t another in the rearview mirror he drank down half the beer, wedging the bottle between his legs. He radioed Starla.

  “Isn’t it your day off?” she asked.

  She sounded annoyed, as though he’d interrupted her during the last episode of The Sopranos.

  “Just checking in. In case something comes up.”

  “I thought you and Jean’d be at the parade, or the rodeo or somewhere.”

  “I’m not feeling that festive,” he said, “and anyway, there’ll be a better parade tomorrow.”

  When there was only the sound of Starla snapping her gum he broke the connection, and ramped up onto the interstate heading south toward Sheridan, propping his elbow in the window so it wouldn’t ache as much. He sipped the beer, watching the clouds mass over the Bighorns to the west. In the foreground the prairie grass stood dried and blanching, bowed heavy with hardened seed-heads, but the creek bottoms were still lush.

  He stopped at a rest area just north of town and snapped open his cell phone and dialed *67 and the telephone number and sat watching a heavy woman lift a dachshund out of her RV. She tucked the dog under her arm and started for a mown patch of prairie behind the toilets.

  On the third ring a woman’s voice announced: “Merrick, Russell, Marcus and King.”

  “Is Larry there?”

  The woman couldn’t bend clear to the ground but she got over far enough to drop the dog, and it bounced just once and stood wagging its tail. Then it ran in a tight circle around her.

  “Do you mean Mr. Russell, sir?”

  “I mean Larry.”

  A man who looked like the woman might if she cut her hair came down the RV’s steps sideways, one step at a time, and opened an aluminum lawn chair on the asphalt, easing himself into it, apparently for the simple pleasure of watching his wife and dog.

  “Mr. Russell is unavailable at the moment. May I take a message?”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July, sir.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said.

  The dog still raced in a circle, just out of reach, as though it’d been bred to bring obese women to bay on open ground.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Russell will be gone through the end of the week. Who may I say’s calling?”

  “I’ve seen the man naked. You can tell him that’s who called.”

  “I guess I know why you blocked your number.”

  The receptionist’s voice was strained but now also curious.

  “I guess you do,” he said.

  In Sheridan he pulled through the drive-up window at the Dairy Queen and ordered two Butterfinger Blizzards, then parked at the curb across the street from Helen’s split-level. He was halfway through the first one when she opened the gate from the sideyard, walking out wrapped in a lime-green beach towel. She bent to pull a garden hose farther away from the house, and a muscled-up Rottweiler straddled the sprinkler, biting at the water until she told him to quit. When she was satisfied the spray wasn’t soaking the fencing she called the dog back through the gate.

  He carried the untouched Blizzard in his good hand, staying out of the flowerbeds, standing finally up against the chin-high board fence, staring into the backyard. “Hello,” he called, and heard the dog growling but couldn’t see it. A voice he didn’t recognize was repeating something in Spanish.

  “Is that you?” Helen called.

  “It’s Crane.”

  “That’s who I meant by ‘you.’”

  He eased the gate open. The Mexican said something about would she mind if he used the bathroom.

  “Is your dog friendly?”

  “Why don’t you come ahead and we’ll see.”

  Around the corner of the house he found her on a redwood chaise. The top half of her swimsuit lay in a little heap on the ground, and she’d pulled the towel up under her chin. Both she and the dog were staring at him. He held up the Blizzard. “I brought you something.”

  She punched the off button on a boom box, where it sat unevenly on the flagstones, and the voice stopped asking for directions to the airport. “Larry’s taking me to Acapulco in September.”

  He nodded, sitting on the edge of a second lounger.

  “What’s in the cup?” she asked, and then more pointedly, “You know it’s been twelve years? You do know that,
don’t you?”

  He’d been staring at the dog and didn’t realize he wasn’t listening. He scooted forward, offering the Blizzard.

  “Something sweet,” he said.

  She popped the lid, stared inside, then laid the cup on its side in front of the dog, who immediately pinned it between its front paws and buried its nose in the ice cream, its dark eyes still on Crane.

  “I had to check,” she said. “A large dose of chocolate can kill a dog.”

  “I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know you had a dog.” He looked around the patio, at each piece of lawn furniture. “I was surprised to see you come out and change the sprinkler.”

  “And you were just driving by?”

  “I was across the street.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “This is the first time. I had to look up your address in the phone book.” His mind kept drifting, and he stared down between his boots to focus. There were ants at work in the cracks between the stones. “I would’ve thought Larry could afford an underground system,” he said.

  “One of the zones sprung a leak. There’s supposed to be someone out later today.”

  “You look good.” He was still staring down.

  “I’m a vegan now,” she said.

  He looked up when he heard the dog tearing the cup to get at the last of the Blizzard. “Larry going without steak and eggs and milk and whatever else too?”

  “The man needs his red meat,” she said.

  When there were only a few shreds of paper left the dog started a low, threatening growl, and Helen slapped him on the head with the flat of her hand.

  “Hush, now,” is what she said when she slapped him a second time. “I’m guessing you already know Larry’s not home, or you would’ve brought him a milkshake too.”

  “I called his office.”

  “Did you really?”

  “I told his secretary I’d seen him naked. It seemed kind of funny at the time.”

  “Does it still seem funny?”

  He shrugged. “Not as much.”

  She stroked the dog’s head, and it settled its chin on its front paws. “Did you tell Kathy that the time you saw her boss naked he was on top of your wife?”

  “I didn’t realize it had been twelve years already.”

  “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  He brought it into his lap, holding it there, wondering if its uselessness was obvious to everyone. “It sort of buzzes.”

  “Like what? Like a bee?”

  “I haven’t been feeling very well.”

  “Not just your arm?”

  “Generally, I guess.”

  “So you thought after twelve years you’d check in to tell me you’re sick?”

  “I was just driving around.”

  “Did you think it would cheer me up?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. I was driving around and then I called Larry, and then you changed your sprinkler.”

  “Are you dying?”

  The question surprised him. “We’re all dying.”

  “But are you over here to tell me you’re going faster than the rest of us?”

  She was wearing sunglasses, but it didn’t matter, he’d never been very good at reading her expressions. “That’s a pretty big leap,” he said.

  “Not really. You look like hell.”

  “I’ve ended up with what my granddad had.”

  She stared at him. Long enough that he looked away, and then back to see if she was still staring at him.

  “That’s absolutely fucked.” She pushed the glasses to the top of her head.

  “I guess I just needed to hear somebody say that out loud.”

  He stood up, and the dog growled and got slapped again.

  She gathered the pieces of the cup and scrunched them together. “If you want to know, I divorced you because I was afraid,” she said. “We’ve never talked about that.”

  He watched her squeeze the paper even tighter. “When we were married? You were afraid of me?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I never laid a hand on you.” He was massaging the bad arm, watching her place the scraps precisely on top of the boom box, still holding the towel across her breasts.

  “But it felt like you wanted to. Like you had to remind yourself not to.”

  They heard a truck pull to the curb in front of the house.

  “That must be your sprinkler guy,” he said.

  “Can you turn around?”

  “What?”

  “I need to get dressed.”

  He stared at the mountains. “Maybe what you felt was something I brought home with me? From being a cop?”

  “Maybe that’s all it was,” she said. “It was a long time ago. We were very, very young.”

  The sound of a truckdoor closing, the drop of a tailgate.

  “You never felt like that with Larry? I mean uneasy.”

  “I guess living with Larry’s kind of like a diet without meat.”

  She stepped to his side. She had her top on now and the towel wrapped around her waist. They could see the cab of a white truck over the fence.

  “I must’ve been feeling homesick or something,” he said.

  Her smile had a certain ease, a coziness that reminded him of an apartment they’d rented in their twenties.

  “Will you turn off the hose on your way out?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “It was good to see you.”

  “You too.”

  “Tell the sprinkler guy I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “All right.”

  She turned, circling his neck with her bare arms, and pulled him against her. Her chin just cleared his shoulder, the wind catching in her hair, fanning it into his face. It smelled like he remembered, like when they were just kids, in high school.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Truly I am.”

  He raised his arms like he might embrace her, then let them drop to his sides. “Thank you,” he said.

  She stepped back and the dog got to its feet, its lips bunched in a soundless snarl.

  “At least you didn’t get bitten.”

  She had her sunglasses on again, and he could see his reflection in their lenses. He looked worn out.

  Nine

  GRIFF HAD PROMISED to help stack the first cutting of alfalfa at the Rocking M and got up in the dark, and when Einar heard her in the kitchen he dressed and went out and sat under the overhead light at the table. He could feel the warmth of it on his head, the muffled agitation of the miller moths circling against the bright globe.

  They listened to the weather and the ranch report on the radio, having a breakfast of toast and jam and coffee, and then he became anxious she might leave without speaking to him.

  “I like it that McEban still square-bales his hay,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I said, I like it that—”

  “You mean, that he didn’t go to those big round bales like everybody else?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I like how the square bales look when they’re stacked.”

  “The shadows they throw.” He felt better now that they’d spoken. “In the winter.”

  She fixed him a plate of leftover ham and green beans for his supper, stretching plastic wrap over the plate, then sliced a tomato, a cucumber and onion into a shallow Tupperware container, drizzling olive oil and vinegar over the raw vegetables. She showed him where she’d grouped it all together in the refrigerator.

  “I’ve still got time to make you something for lunch.” She turned the radio off. “In case you change your mind.”

  “You’d better not,” he said. “If I eat in the middle of the day I’ll need to lie down.” He hadn’t moved from the table.

  “I’m not going to be home until late.” She was in the mudroom getting her jacket and workgloves and cap.

  “You can stay all night if y
ou like.”

  “I might.”

  “I think you should,” he said.

  She came back, kissed him and looked around the kitchen, and when there was nothing left to do she kissed him again. He thought she smelled like wet coins, like stripped copper wiring mixed with something sweet, and wondered if she ate candy in bed. If it helped her sleep.

  She stopped at the door. “You won’t forget to smoke your cigarette?”

  “Not hardly,” he said.

  He heard her on the porch and then the truck starting up in the workyard. Her kiss had tasted fruity from the lip balm she used, and now he had the whole day to himself. An old man with a single task he expected to accomplish before she returned, every part of which he’d rehearsed a dozen times in his imagination.

  He washed his face and shaved, working his tongue over his bottom lip to see if he could still taste her, and he could.

  Before it got any hotter he started up through the sage and the paintbrush and yarrow, turning back and forth on the ascending grades of the switchbacks, keeping to the trail his nearly forty years of diligence has worn into the hillside just opposite the house.

  When he became short of breath he stopped until he regained it, and when a cloud passed before the sun he didn’t move at all, allowing the breeze to cool him thoroughly. He was in no hurry.

  He simply meant to gain the top of the rise one deliberate step at a time, stabbing a shovel into the earth as a staff, with Griff’s high-school backpack slung over his shoulder and a long, iron tamping bar balanced atop that same shoulder, a bulging plastic garbage bag dangling like something an old hobo might invent. A pair of fluorescent dice hung from a carabiner clicked through a webbed loop on the side of the backpack, and underneath it the patch of a frowning yellow bee with the stitched caption Bee-otch.

  It took the better part of an hour, but when he topped out under the big cottonwood he felt all right. Not great, but not worn down to the nub. It surprised him. He leaned the shovel and tamping bar against the tree and shrugged off the backpack, setting it by the garbage bag. He eased down onto the single cane chair that stood next to the trunk, tipping his hat off and hanging it on a knee so the wind could work at his hair. When his scalp prickled he dabbed at his head with a bandanna.