Bone Fire

by Mark Spragg

“I’ll come get you if she calls,” he said.

  She stripped out of her clothes, and washed her hair twice, soaping and rinsing the woodsmoke away, finally standing braced against the side of the stall, crying until the water turned cold. Her eyes were puffy when she came out in her robe. She sat at the table.

  He’d made coffee and poured her a cup, but her throat was so dry she coughed it back up through her nose.

  She cleaned her face with a paper napkin, dabbing at the stains on the front of her robe. “Do you ever watch yourself?” she asked.

  “Sure. Sometimes I do.”

  “I watch myself all the time,” she said, “and right now I’m a fucking mess.”

  “I think you’re doing fine.”

  She held a hand out between them. It was shaking. “You always think I’m doing fine,” she said.

  He took a cribbage board from a drawer and talked her into a game, but she had trouble deciding which cards to play. She folded her arms on the table, resting her cheek against a forearm. He reached over to rub her neck.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I wish you’d tell me why you’re mad.”

  “I’m not.” She puffed at her hair and it lifted, falling back against her face.

  “Then how come you wouldn’t let me help you finish the firing?”

  “I wanted to see if I could do it myself. Straight through.”

  He tried to comb his fingers through her hair, moving it away from her eyes, and she sat straight up.

  “I was tired of looking at you,” she said. “Okay?”

  He studied her face. Mostly she looked just tired. “Okay.”

  He took a carton of eggs and a package of bacon from the refrigerator and put a pan on the stovetop.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “You could try.”

  “I tried a piece of toast when I was waiting for you. I felt like I was going to puke.”

  The phone rang and she was up and had the receiver even before he could turn toward the sound.

  “Are you there? Hello?” Marin’s voice sounded fragile.

  “I’m here.”

  “I thought I’d call early. I thought you might be worried.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s still asleep, but he’s going to be just fine.”

  Paul was staring at her and she turned away, pacing with the phone.

  “I can’t picture ‘just fine.’ I don’t know what that looks like.”

  “It means we were lucky to be up here in Billings. So close to a hospital. They did a CT scan and put him on a blood thinner right away. An anticoagulant. They don’t think there’ll be any damage. But he needs some rest, and they want to watch him a little bit longer. See how he does on the medication.”

  “Is that what the doctor said?”

  “He said it was a wake-up call.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table. “That’s such a bullshit thing to say. All it means is he’s not dead yet.”

  “I think the doctor meant it to be more hopeful than that.” Marin cleared her throat. “I need to lie down. They’ve put a bed in here for me.”

  “I’m coming up.”

  “You don’t have to do that. Really. We should be home soon enough.”

  “Paul’s coming too.”

  She looked at Paul and he nodded. She could hear a door open and close on Marin’s end. Water running at a sink.

  “The nurse just came in,” she said.

  “Do you need us to bring anything?”

  “A change of clothes would be nice. A sweater if you can find one. They keep it cool in here.”

  “Toothpaste?”

  “I got all that at the shop downstairs. But you could call Marlene Silas and see if she’ll keep Sammy awhile longer.” She cleared her throat again and said something to the nurse, but Griff couldn’t distinguish the words. “When you get here,” she said, “if I’m asleep just let me sleep. I haven’t been able to yet.”

  The line went dead.

  They gassed up Paul’s car at the Mini-Mart, bought cans of Red Bull and a package of powdered doughnuts and didn’t see a single cop on the Wyoming side or in Montana either, making the one-hundred-seven-mile drive to the hospital in an hour and twenty-three minutes.

  He dropped her off at reception, and a nurse took her by the elbow and pointed her down the right hallway.

  He was awake when she came in, and when she bent to kiss him he rose up out of the bed and wrapped her in his arms, gripping fistfuls of fabric at the yoke of her shirt, as though only the buoyancy of her young body was keeping them afloat. Then he fell away and lay there smiling.

  “I thought your face might be crooked,” she said.

  The smile moved into his eyes.

  “It’s just his left arm that’s weak.” Marin was standing behind her. “And the leg on that side. Did Paul come?”

  “He’s parking the car.” She took his left hand in both of hers and he squeezed lightly. Like a small child might.

  “See.” He swallowed. “It’s not that bad.”

  She smoothed his cheek. “When can we go home?” she asked.

  He looked toward Marin.

  “We need to make arrangements for physical therapy,” she said. “They’re satisfied with everything else.”

  Griff straightened. “The doctor could show me how. Or the nurse could.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Marin’s got it taken care of,” he said.

  Paul carried their lunches up from the hospital cafeteria and they ate together, and when Marin curled down on the other bed and Einar drifted off she found his doctor, asking enough questions to believe this was something they could do. And that he would improve.

  The next morning at Costco, she bought pillows and a blanket and a CD of great performances by the New York Philharmonic, and they got him settled comfortably in the backseat. They played the CD twice on the drive home, Mahler and Vaughan Williams, Barber and Tchaikovsky, Paul following in the one-ton with Marin’s new furniture.

  A physical therapist named Shawnee came up from Sheridan on Thursday and by Friday afternoon he could hobble down the hallway without the aluminum walker. Shawnee said she thought a week of that kind of improvement and she could start tapering off. She scribbled down her phone number, insisting it wasn’t a bother to drive up on the weekend if they needed her, and stayed for dinner when she was asked. They learned she was raised on a ranch in Star Valley.

  On Saturday morning he fell in the shower. Griff heard his body hit the porcelain, heard him cry out and found him on his side in the tub. He’d dragged the shower curtain off the rod and was holding it over his groin.

  “Where are you hurt?” She turned the water off, kneeling on the floor. “Tell me where.”

  “Not you,” he said. “Please.”

  “Get a chair.” Marin moved her to the side and kneeled down over him, and by the time she returned from the kitchen he was up, sitting on the side of the tub, Marin holding him steady. They got him into the chair with the shower curtain still across his lap.

  “I’m going to call Shawnee,” Marin said.

  “Nothing’s broke.” He was still having a little trouble getting his breath. “She doesn’t need to drive over here just to look at some clumsy old son of a bitch.”

  Marin draped a towel across his shoulders and he tilted his head to the side, digging a finger into his ear.

  “I hate getting water in my ears,” he said.

  He asked her to leave and Marin helped him into his bathrobe, then down the hallway with his walker. He was only limping.

  That night he called for Griff, and when she came in he had the magnifying glass slung around and was holding a book open at his waist. She sat on the side of the bed.

  “I’m getting stronger. I can feel that I am,” he said, and when she didn’t respond: “I just fell on my ass. I’ve done that my whole life.”

  “You had a stroke.”

  “I’ve prob
ably been having them for a year.”

  “What am I going to do with you?” Even to her the question sounded like a parent’s.

  “Right there’s where I’m going with this,” he said. “I want you to get out and do something with your life.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whatever in the hell you want to do.” He’d raised his voice, trying to sound mad, but it had no effect. “We’ve talked about this before.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time.” She slipped the book from his hands. “It doesn’t have to be this fall.”

  “Nobody’s got plenty of time.” He nodded toward the door. “She needs to take care of me,” he said. “We both need it.”

  She closed the book and left it on the nightstand.

  The next afternoon thunderclouds rolled down off the mountains and the wind picked up and the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees. Four inches of pea-sized hail fell in half an hour and then it rained like a levee had broken in the heavens. An icy mixture filled the borrow ditches.

  It cleared overnight and got hot again the next morning, and the nose flies and deerflies swarmed thickly as gnats. The horses bunched in the shade shaking their heads, their eyes swelling from the bites, rubbing their faces into one another’s shoulders. When they couldn’t stand it any longer they pawed at the air and ran.

  A den of snakes had been flushed from a dry hillside on Nameit Creek, and the kids there carried hoes when they went out to do their chores, and the clinic called a hospital in Billings to ship down a reserve of antivenom just in case.

  She saddled Royal and trailered him over to the corrals and loading chute on Deep Creek. Paul was waiting for her on a well-mannered dappled gelding he called Mister.

  They rode the leases up on the mountain, where the cattle were still scattered and edgy, and in the late afternoon they found a heifer and her calf killed by lightning. Their bellies were torn open, and a gang of coyotes sat in ragged order against the skyline just thirty yards away, their muzzles and chests stained with fresh blood. Crowding the treeline was an assortment of raptors and ravens, a pair of golden eagles and a mob of lesser birds drawn to the excitement.

  She rested a forearm against the saddlehorn, leaning over it to stare at the dead calf.

  “It could’ve been a lot worse.” Paul took a notebook from his shirt pocket and recorded the numbers on their eartags.

  “Not for them.” She reined her horse around, and he fell in beside her.

  “I took a job with the County Health Department in Billings.”

  She stopped the horse, the bird chatter almost making it hard to hear. “No more Africa?”

  “You were right. It’s too far away.”

  “And you’re bailing on graduate school too?”

  “I thought you’d be happy.”

  She looked back at the coyotes edging in to finish their meal, and snorted a laugh and spurred her horse forward.

  “So we’re done talking about this?”

  “I have things to do in my studio,” she said.

  Twenty-seven

  JEAN STEPPED OUT of the shower, drying off with a towel she’d brought in from the clothesline. It was stiff and knobby and brought the blood to the surface of her skin. She turned to the side, examining herself in the full-length mirror mounted on the inside of the bathroom door. She sucked her stomach flat. Her arms and shoulders and legs appeared unblemished, darkened from working in the garden. She smoothed lotion on, twice on her elbows, knees and heels.

  She sat in her terry-cloth robe at the vanity in the bedroom, applying makeup, returning to the bathroom to wash it off, settling on just a hint of eyeliner and a pale lip gloss. She didn’t want the effort to show.

  She drank iced tea and smoked four cigarettes on the sunporch waiting for her hair to dry, then went to the bedroom and shucked her robe off on the floor and brushed her hair until it shone, drawing it away from her face and securing it with a silver clasp. This was her best feature. Men stared at her hair even before moving their gaze to her breasts, her hips. Silver pendants in her ears. No necklace. She didn’t want to break the long, graceful lines of her neck.

  She slipped into the powder-blue panties and bra she’d bought at Victoria’s Secret and stood in front of the mirror again, pushing her breasts up and together, drawing her hands away slowly. Her reflection was nodding.

  She chose the jeans that made her ass look like she ran thirty miles a week, brown leather sandals with no heels, the beige silk-and-linen twinset that showed off her tan. She studied herself in the vanity mirror. This wasn’t man-pretty. That was something entirely different. This was down-to-business pretty. Then she took his grandmother’s pearl ring from her jewelry box and slipped it on, extending her hand to appreciate its simple beauty. She closed her hand into a fist.

  She drove to the Hub with the windows up and the AC on low so she’d arrive fresh. There were a dozen cars and pickups in the lot, another dozen Harleys backed in against the concrete divider set in front of a hedgerow of caragana. She parked around the side of the log building and sat for a minute watching the tops of the cottonwoods to make sure the wind wasn’t up. The women’s bathroom wasn’t well lit and she didn’t want to have to fix her hair again.

  She hadn’t had a drink all day. With her eyes closed she could imagine the first one, the warm flush spreading across her cheeks like a shawl over her shoulders. But not yet. Right now it was all about attitude, about having the edge.

  She walked in through the side door and stood at the end of the bar, leaning into the padded bumper. She loved the odor of bars, especially in the summer. Damp, cool and yeasty, like a sip of beer.

  The men sitting near her stared and looked away. She watched their reflections in the mirror set behind the rows of bottles, the bikers and cowboys and businessmen.

  The bartender slid a coaster in front of her, tapping it with a forefinger. “It’s margarita night,” he said.

  He wore black slacks and a white shirt with a pleated front, black garters snapped above the elbows to hold the sleeves back. It’s what passed for a uniform at the Hub.

  “How’s it going, Jamie?”

  “Same old same old.” He tilted his head back, his lips pursed like an old man’s, studying her. “I’m glad to say you aren’t looking your age.”

  “You’re a sweetheart.” But he was too young, and spent too much time in the gym to be interesting. She pushed back from the bar. “I’ll order something with dinner,” she said.

  “You want me to send Crane in when he shows?”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband,” he said. “If he comes in through the bar.”

  “If he does, I’d buy a ticket to that event.”

  She weaved through the tables, pausing in the archway to the dining room. Deep red carpeting, red draperies, flocked wallpaper crowded with pale watercolors, their prices printed on little white cards stuck to their frames. There was a banker and his wife from Sheridan she recognized, a real-estate agent working a client, a dozen families of tourists in their shorts and T-shirts advertising the places where they’d last vacationed. Helen sat at a table by the salad bar, both hands around a glass set on the red paper placemat in front of her. She wore a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and jeans. The scene held a strangely patriotic quality.

  She walked across the room with her shoulders squared and her chin up. When she sat down she made sure her eyes were cold, and when Helen smiled she just stared.

  A waitress appeared at her shoulder. “Would the lady like a cocktail?” She had an Eastern European accent.

  “I sure would.” Jean leaned toward the girl’s nameplate—Ksenia—and wagged a finger toward Helen without turning to her. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

  “It’s a gin and tonic.” Helen held the glass up as a woman might in an advertisement.

  “Bombay in mine.” Jean lounged back in the chair.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The girl backed away, bowing slightl
y at the waist, and Helen sipped her drink. She coughed, holding her napkin to her mouth.

  “I don’t normally drink,” she said.

  Her voice had been shaky on the phone when Jean called. Now it was just flat, but her body was sharp and shapely under the loose clothing. If she was nervous she’d made no effort to dress it down.

  “I do,” Jean said. “Every chance I get.”

  Helen nodded as Ksenia placed Jean’s drink before her and took out her order pad.

  “We’re not ready yet,” Jean said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They watched her backing toward the kitchen.

  “They can’t get American kids to work,” Helen said.

  Jean sipped her drink, then set the glass near the center of the table. Like shooting fish in a barrel, she thought.

  “He’s got Lou Gehrig’s,” Helen said.

  “Right.”

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  Helen’s lips were still moving, but the words had become slurred, the music on the sound system slowing. Jean sat back in her chair and finished her drink in two gulps. She laughed. “You’re telling me my husband’s dying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he came to you?”

  “I don’t think he meant to. But yes, he did.”

  “Like an accident?”

  “No. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “And he couldn’t tell me?” Helen’s voice was coming clearer now, but Jean didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “Did he tell you why?”

  “I don’t think they know why anyone gets ALS.”

  “Why he couldn’t tell me.”

  “He said he didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Really?”

  “Something like that.”

  “He didn’t think fucking his ex-wife would worry me?” This wasn’t like shooting anything in a barrel.

  “We never did make love. If that’s any consolation.”

  “It’s not.”

  Helen was folding her napkin into a triangle. “But we tried,” she said.

  “Did you hold him?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you weren’t making love. When you were trying to comfort him.”