by Mark Spragg
He finished his wine and pulled his boots off and walked to the bedroom doorway. She was sitting with the covers folded to her waist, the lamp on beside the bed. He looked toward the window, but the curtains were drawn. He pulled his shirttails loose. “I’m not going to be a lot of good to you.” He shrugged. “I should’ve said something about it the other night.” He watched her set her wine on the night table.
“The ALS take this away from you too?”
“I guess that’s what it was.”
“Didn’t you go to a doctor? I mean, don’t you want to find out?”
“I didn’t see the point.”
“Jean might’ve.”
“I think she’s relieved.”
There was the rattling drone of the air conditioner, the cadence of the traffic beyond, constant as a dog chewing a bone.
“It’s going to be a long afternoon with you just standing there,” she said.
He nodded, snapping the front of his shirt open, stepping out of his jeans and underpants. He stood for a moment holding his clothes, and she laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s kind of like going back to the house where you were raised.”
“You mean everything looks smaller than you remember?”
“I meant familiar.”
He set his jeans and underwear on the seat of a chair and pulled his shirt off.
“Your socks too,” she said.
She turned onto her side, and he pressed in against her, his knees bent against the backs of her thighs. She reached up and turned off the lamp.
“You upset?” he asked.
“I’ll get over it in a minute.”
He put an arm around her, across her breasts. “I guess I really didn’t think what this would be like. I thought I did, but I hadn’t.”
“You remember Sarah Meeks?”
“From high school?”
“Yeah.” She turned and lay facing him. “I saw her in Denver. At a gallery. She had three little girls with her.”
“I didn’t know her very well.”
“Neither did I, but I recognized her right away. Her husband was with her. I think he said he sold something, I don’t remember what, but I’ve been thinking about those kids.” He could smell the wine on her breath. “Do you regret not having any?”
“I’ve had Griff. Sort of. We’ve gotten along all right.”
“I regret it,” she said.
He pulled away, looking down at her. “You still could.”
“With Larry?”
“Yeah.”
She tucked her head, pressing her forehead against his chest. She’d always liked the sour-spicy scent of his body. “It’s too late for that.” She touched his chest lightly, with just the tips of her fingers, then looked up at him. “Did you ever think about what you’d be when you grew up?”
“I never thought I’d be a cop.”
“What about when you were a kid?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I promise I won’t.”
He rolled onto his back. “I thought I was going to be special.”
“Like a movie star?”
“More like a heart surgeon, or an architect. I thought I’d be a man people would admire.”
“Women, you mean.”
“I mean both. I thought maybe I’d invent something useful. It really wasn’t so much about money.”
She got up on an elbow, looking down at him. “But you never had something you were crazy to do? Something you thought you might die if you never did?”
“There wasn’t anything like that.”
She lay down against him. “You’re lucky,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do. I think it would be hard to die knowing you never took a shot at something you felt like you needed to do.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“I was wild to get married to you.” She held her hand flat against his chest. “I wasn’t worth a damn at it, but it’s what I used to dream about when I was a girl.”
“Shit.”
“I know. You should’ve married a woman with higher aspirations.”
He looked toward the window again. There still wasn’t anything to see. “Not much turns out like you think it might.”
Nineteen
IT HAD BEEN EIGHT YEARS and all they’d done was box up his clothes and strip the sheets from the bed after the funeral home took the body away. Einar had also taken the framed photograph of the 9th Cavalry buffalo soldier. He’d cleaned the glass, hanging it over his bed as others might a crucifix. It kept the memory of Mitch present in his mind.
The man in the photo was dressed in uniform, standing his horse in a field of snow, a grouping of storm-obscured buildings in the background. On the back, a simple X in the lower right corner, dated 1884. Had the rider been able to cipher out the letters he would have written his name as Abraham Bradley.
He’d come west out of Georgia in 1883 with Mitch’s father just old enough not to slow him down, and a consumptive wife who would weaken and die a year later. As a widower he’d leased his son to the owner of a freight wagon for a dollar a year, and the man had fed and housed the boy, working him hard as a rented animal but not so brutally as to break him down.
If Abraham was self-conscious about his decision to abandon the boy it didn’t show in the photograph. He sat that thin-necked cavalry mount as though he’d been granted ownership of the world and all that roamed across it. He died nine months later of the bloody flux, shitting himself down to under a hundred pounds.
Marin got Paul to haul Mitch’s used-up old mattress to the dump, along with the worn and canvas-patched easy chairs and a dresser with the laminate splintered off. And Griff found a newlywed couple who were thankful for the nightstand and steamer trunk, the Formica dining table and mismatched chairs. They unbolted the vise and dental drill from Mitch’s workbench, disassembling the scarred planking they’d been mounted on and stacking the boards out of the weather behind the granary.
That left only a single carved elk antler mounted on the north wall with an eight-year-old calendar hanging next to it. Griff leaned the antler out on the porch, and Marin hired a handyman from town to take up the linoleum in the bathroom and replace it with slate-colored tiles. After he was finished they went back in and scrubbed the logs, chinking and floorboards.
Now Griff and Marin stood together just inside the door. The brass urn that held Alice’s ashes was centered on a windowsill, the single object Marin had moved in. She unclipped a tape measure from her belt, running the tape out, Griff holding its end in the far corner under the front windows. Marin recorded the distance, letting the tape rewind. She held a pad of engineering paper, segmented into a grid of quarter-inch squares, up against her forearm, finishing the rough diagram as she walked out onto the porch.
They sat at the shaded table, taking turns petting Sammy.
“Did she want you to scatter her ashes somewhere?”
“I think I’m just going to keep them around.” Marin smiled. “Like she did with me.” She tore the top sheet away from the pad and slipped a credit card out of her wallet, using it as a straightedge to copy the interior measurements of the cabin onto an unmarked sheet of paper.
“If you and Einar can wait until next week to do your shopping I can come up to Billings with you.”
“We’ll be fine,” Marin said. “I don’t want you to change your plans.” She was bent over her diagram. “Anyway, I already asked Marlene Silas if she’d take care of Sammy.” A mosquito landed on her arm, and she slapped it.
“I didn’t know Buddhists went around smacking bugs.”
“Maybe he’ll come back as something that doesn’t suck blood.” She tapped at the pad with her pen. “I’m sorry for what I said in your studio when we first met.”
“I don’t remember what you said.”
“It was something dismissive about you only
making bones.”
Griff shrugged. “I didn’t take it wrong.”
“You should’ve. I wasn’t trying to be flattering.” She pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “I saw your sculptures,” she said. “You ought to show them somewhere. In a gallery.”
“Paul says that all the time.”
“Well, he’s right.”
“I can make better ones now.”
“Maybe you can, but the ones up in the meadow kicked my old butt around the block.”
Griff tilted Mitch’s antler away from the wall and held it in her lap. “Are you going to have any of your furniture shipped out from Chicago?” She worked the pad of a thumb against the heads and shoulders of the horses carved into the antler’s base, streaming out along the bottom tines.
“You don’t take compliments very well, do you?”
“I was just wondering.”
“I’m going to keep it all in Chicago. In case someone needs to live there.”
“Like Paul?”
“We talked about him using the place when he goes back to school.”
Griff stared down at the antler. She remembered others into which Mitch had carved the bodies of wolves, bears and mountain lions, all of them given away to friends.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to see him get old.” Marin slotted the pen behind her ear. “Sitting in there all alone carving those things with that old drill.”
“You can have this one if you want.”
Marin shook her head. “It’s a little too Western for me.”
They sat watching the nighthawks feeding in the dusk, falling like shards of gray stone, the air coming alive with the breathy sighs their wings made as they pulled out of their dives.
“My bone people,” she said. “They’re what I see when I close my eyes.”
“Would they be there now? If you shut your eyes?”
“Yes.”
A pair of bats steered through the nighthawks, seeming to stagger in their jolting flight. Behind them, the tops of the Bighorns, soft and darkening.
Marin sang, “‘Now that the day has reached its close, the sun doth shine no more.’” Her voice was flat on the higher notes.
“What’s that from?”
She sang: “‘In sleep the toil-worn find repose and all who wept before.’” A light went on in the kitchen of the main house. “It’s a hymn my mother and Einar used to sing in the evenings. I haven’t thought of it for years. They were the ones with the good voices.”
“I’ve never heard him sing anything,” Griff said.
They heard him searching through cupboards, the chatter of silverware taken from a drawer.
“Just before I left for Chicago, which seems like another lifetime ago. Einar was only twenty then, maybe twenty-one, I always forget his birthday, and Mitch was about the same. You should’ve seen them.” Her hand went to her throat. “You almost had to look at them out of the corner of your eye. To bear it, I mean.” She was still watching the hawks flying in arcs above the cottonwood. “Sometimes I think they were too beautiful to have lived anywhere but here. They’d have looked out of place.” She pushed her chair back. “I thought that even though it was girls I liked best.”
She stood up, and Sammy scrambled ahead down the porchsteps. “The figures you made, they made me feel like I was ready to pass on.”
“You mean die?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean,” she said. “They made me feel satisfied with my life.”
Twenty
THE NIGHT AFTER Claire gave him the iPod he fell asleep listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, waking in the middle of the night with a headache, the buzzing in his chest so acute that he lifted his T-shirt to see what was going on. After that, he let it charge while he slept.
He wore the earbuds during the day when they couldn’t find enough for him to do or he got bored shooting baskets, and when he’d heard all the songs three times and they started cycling through again, he pushed the double dash to make it stop. On the evening of his fourteenth day in Laramie, he wrapped the earbud wires in a neat coil around the body of the iPod, laid it out in plain sight beside the computer, then waited.
Once everyone was in bed, he turned the computer on and printed out maps of Laramie, Cheyenne and the interstate to the north. There were windows on the maps, like the little clouds above a comic-book character with what they’re saying or thinking printed inside, except these had the addresses and telephone numbers of the bus stations in each town.
He’d checked it all out on the computer the week before, and he had to be at the bus station in Laramie by three-thirty in the morning to buy his ticket. He’d ride the bus to Denver and change to another to come back up through Wyoming to Gillette, where he had to change again, not getting to Sheridan until almost ten o’clock that night. Almost eighteen hours, and it had only taken Rodney six hours to drive from Ishawooa to Laramie, but there weren’t any alternatives he could think of. He guessed it was because most people had cars of their own, and only really, really poor people, or kids who wanted to get home, took the bus. He’d never been to Denver and was excited to see it, if a little afraid he’d mess up somehow, having no firsthand experience with public transportation. He wasn’t worried about the change in Gillette. He’d been there before and thought a monkey could change buses in Gillette. He thought he’d figure out how to get to the ranch after that.
He turned the computer off, dusting it and the printer and the tables and shelves with a sock. Then he stripped the bed and wadded the sheets on the floor by the door and folded the blanket into a perfect square, centering it at the foot of the mattress. He placed the pillow on top, then packed.
He cracked the door open, listening until his legs started to quiver, and when he was sure they were all asleep he crept downstairs with his backpack, the dirty sheets under his arm. He put them in the hamper and tiptoed into the kitchen, where he didn’t need to turn on a light with the yellow glow from the streetlamp pouring in through the window over the sink.
He made two sandwiches with the lunchmeat and cheese he found in the refrigerator, stuffing them both into a single Ziploc baggy and slipping that into an outside pocket of his backpack. He got an apple and put that in too. Then he found the pad and pen by the phone and sat at the kitchen table, thinking about what to write. He wanted them to know he appreciated everything they’d done for him. He thought writing it longhand in pen was better than printing it out on the computer—more personal, like they were friends.
Thank you, very much, he wrote. I had a wonderful time. It is a good thing to know I have a brother and sister, and a spare father and mother. Your house is nice and quiet even though you live in a city. I will have lots of stories to tell from this adventure, and good times to remember. Don’t worry because I know how to get home. I paid attention on the trip here. Good-bye, Kenneth.
He left the note on the kitchen table, where it would be the first thing they saw when they came down for breakfast. He checked the LCD display on the microwave and it was only just after midnight. He was too excited to know if he was sleepy.
He emptied his pockets and counted out the money on the counter by the sink. This was the third time, but he wanted to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake. McEban had given him two fifty-dollar bills, and he’d saved seventy-three dollars from his allowance, all in ones, a thick roll held tight with a rubber band. The computer had said the bus ticket would cost a hundred and four dollars, and he laid out the two fifties and four ones, stacking twenty singles for expenses beside it. He folded the last forty-nine dollars, doubling the rubber band around it, lifted up his pants leg and stuffed it down the top of his boot. He put the money for the ticket in his shirt pocket, the traveling money in his jeans.
He thought leaving cash for the food he was taking might be insulting, so he dug in the bottom of his backpack for the empty Copenhagen can McEban had let him have. He popped the lid off and pinched the top layer of Kleenex away and lifted the arrowhe
ad out, a long, tapering point made of moss agate that he held up to the light over the sink. Then he set it on top of the note and added a postscript.
This is mine and I’d like you to have it. I found it when I was six and one half on top of the Bighorns, but I can’t tell you exactly where. It is a secret. I made two sandwiches. Kenneth again.
After taking a hard look at everything in the kitchen so he could recreate the room for McEban, he slipped out the door, and stood under a shade tree by the garage, watching the street. It was empty. He whispered the full content of the lies he thought he might have to use to get home, to reassure himself he had them firmly in his memory. His mother had told him once that it wasn’t lying if you told people what they wanted to hear, so he’d lain in bed at night thinking about every problem a ten-year-old boy might encounter on an eighteen-hour bus trip, all the questions he might be asked, making lists of the answers he thought people would want to hear. He didn’t kid himself about them not being lies.
Then he picked up his basketball from where he’d left it on the edge of the driveway.
Twenty-one
JEAN WASN’T THERE when he got home, and he looked for a note but couldn’t find one. He showered and shaved and stretched out on the bed and fell asleep with the windows open and a breeze coming through. He slept undisturbed for an hour and a half, and when he woke she still wasn’t home. He remembered vivid fragments of a dream in which he was flying, or falling, but couldn’t piece together any sort of narrative, wondering if the ALS was affecting his subconscious as well.
He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and went out to the kitchen to find something to make for supper, taking a Tupperware container of cooked rice from the refrigerator and layering the bottom of a bowl with it, then browning a package of hamburger and spooning it over the rice. He grated a hard cheese onto the hamburger and nuked it for a minute, then diced part of an onion and a red pepper, and dumped them on top. It was his favorite meal, something he’d made after school when he was a kid.