Bone Fire (12 page)

She lit a fresh cigarette from the one she was done with, reaching
a framed photo down from a shelf at her shoulder. She wiped the glass with the towel at her neck, then leaned over her knees to offer Crane the picture. “Right there’s what she looked like.” She eased back in the chair, watching her husband change the regulator over to the fresh bottle. “I seen that photo in the Wal-Mart and thought it was Janey herself, but it ain’t. I mean, I got no idea who that girl is there. They take them photos just to sell you the frame, but that one there I bought for the picture. If that ain’t a likeness of Janey you can kiss my fat ass.”

Crane squared the frame in his hands. The picture was of a blonde girl, her hair done into curls at the top of her head, and she wore a shiny white dress and a strand of pearls. She looked like a bridesmaid for a friend who’d gotten pregnant in high school and probably wouldn’t be going to college. “That’s a beautiful girl,” he said.

“You got that right,” the woman said.

Benton walked the empty bottle to the door and came back, bending over to squint at the oxygen gauge. He tapped it with a fingernail. “You need me to fetch you your nebulizer, sweety pie?”

“I’m fine without it for now.” She stubbed her cigarette in the plate, then pitched forward again coughing. Her scalp showed through her thin hair, reddening.

“I wish she’d give them things up,” Benton said. “Throw ’em in the goddamn ditch. You ever smoke?”

“No. I never liked the taste of them.”

“Me neither.”

“Well, good for you healthy sons a bitches.” She was sitting up sucking on her cannula. “You can give that picture back now if you’re done with it.”

He handed the picture over to her. “I knew a girl who looked something like that when I was in high school,” he said.

“I guess Benton here’s up shit’s creek now,” she said. “I been tellin’ the simple son of a bitch he can’t just park where he likes without gettin’ one of them license plates with a wheelchair on it.”

Crane stood from the couch. “I really don’t care where you park, Mrs. Grasslie. Neither one of you.”

“Well, you goddamn for sure should. What if I wasn’t handicapped? What about that?”

“If you hear from your daughter, would you ask her to get in touch with me?”

She rolled her head back, staring at the ceiling. “We ain’t gonna hear from her.”

“But if you do.”

She leveled her head. “Can I get you to leave on out of here if I say I will?”

“I guess I’m done anyway.” He had his hand on the doorknob, thinking about the young, nervous kids he’d interviewed, most of them just smoking pot on the weekends, a few of them tweaking, pale and reckless and empty. He was looking out through the thin curtain at his cruiser. “I didn’t have to come back here,” he said. “I had the GI Bill after Bush One’s war. I could’ve gone lots of places.”

“I wish I’d have fought in a war.” The skinny husband looked up from where he knelt at the coffee table, carefully placing little bars of lead into the melting pot.

Crane stared at him. “I guess I just couldn’t think of anyplace else to go.”

“I hear that,” the woman said. She tried to turn toward him but it was a hard position to hold and the effort shortened her breath. “Before you get out of here I need you to understand that we grew her up good. Got her started out right,” she said. “There wasn’t nothin’ wrong with what we done.”

“Yes, ma’am. If you say so.”

“Maybe Kayla knows where she is,” Benton said, and they both looked at him. He appeared excited by the thought.

“Kayla don’t know word one about her sister,” she said. “Or us neither.”

“You don’t know what she knows.”

“She don’t know shit from Shinola. That’s what I know.”

“I might like to ask her,” Crane said.

She slumped back in the chair, puffed out her cheeks and lit another cigarette. “Well, I hope you have a good goddamn time in Denver, then. That’s what I hope.”

“Colorado?”

“There ain’t no Denver anything else as far as I know.” She turned to Benton, flicking the lighted cigarette at him like he was a bothersome dog. “You sure got a lot to say about girls you didn’t father,” she said.

He picked the cigarette off the carpet, keeping his head down, rubbing at a spot in the shag that had been singed.

E
INAR AND GRIFF
had gone to bed early and Marin had tried to sleep. But her head was pounding, the room too warm, close, even with the windows thrown open. Then the first wave of nausea hit.

She stumbled out into the hallway, drawing a robe across her shoulders, and stood clinging to the beading in the rough wooden wallboards. Her body was now soaked with sweat, but it felt better to be up and moving. She thought a cool glass of water might help.

In the kitchen she tipped a chair over, the sound of it striking the floor tearing through her like a gunshot, and her legs gave out. She sat down hard, more shocked than hurt, a collage of disjointed images from the drive west snapping through her mind as unexpected as a camera’s flash. The dank motel room in Sioux Falls, asleep for an hour in its shallow tub, the whine of traffic, the bitter coffee she brewed on the counter beside the television. There were fragments of phone poles ticking by, wires sagging with blackbirds, a ball thrown for Sammy.

She crawled to the door, leaning into the jamb, finally dragging herself out onto the porch. The air was cooler but it didn’t comfort her, as the optimism she and Alice had tried to maintain after the surgeries hadn’t comforted, and when the remembered odors of body wastes and antiseptics and salves swept through her, she
vomited over the edge. She had no idea what she thought she was going to do.

She slept in ragged bouts through the night, visions cycling of Alice’s graying face, her thinning neck and hands, her hair brittle and then gone completely after the first rounds of chemo. At one point she heard the hospital’s simpleminded pastor refer to “God in His wisdom,” and recalled that she too had prayed, bargaining for her lover’s life. She felt the hollowing disappointment of the loss all over again, the wretchedness of an ineffective mendicant.

Griff found her in the morning and got her into bed. She cleaned her great-aunt’s face and hands, feeding her spoonfuls of warm sugar water, and in the afternoon she was able to sip a half cup of tea. She fell back to sleep, not waking until the next afternoon. She lay motionless in her bed, counting the knots in the ceilingboards to stay focused, feeling fragile as glassware.

That evening she had the strength to shower and dress in a clean nightgown, and Griff brought her a tray with coffee, a soft-boiled egg and toast.

She sipped the coffee, tapped the egg with the edge of a spoon. “How’s Einar taking all of this?”

“He’s been sitting on a chair in the hallway.”

“Is he out there now?” Marin turned toward the door. “Are you there?” she called.

They heard the chairlegs scrape.

“I’m right here.” He was standing in the doorway.

“Have you lost your mind, sitting out there like that?”

“I probably have.”

She shook her head and took a bite of toast. “That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.”

He moved to the bed, reaching out gently to find her, and she patted his hand.

“I just let myself get rundown. That’s all it was.”

“Yes,” he said with some surety, as though the problem had now been resolved to his satisfaction. “That’s exactly what happened.”

• • •

In the afternoons they sat together on the porch, just the two of them, speaking easily of the habits of songbirds, the rising cost of groceries and gasoline, how the warming of the planet was reported vacuously—as though it were no more than the wear and tear of an ordinary garment—and how sugar inevitably destroyed a person’s vitality, and toward the end of that first week, having grown more accustomed to each other, they launched into stories from their childhood. The brandings, dances, weddings, broken bones, rodeos, storms, arguments. At times pulling their chairs around, each facing the other, reaching across their laps to hold hands.

Griff busied herself in the kitchen, keeping the front windows open so she could eavesdrop, listening for bursts of Marin’s laughter that she thought she would have recognized anywhere and known as the sound of family.

“Dance with me,” Marin suggested one afternoon, standing up, pulling him to his feet, and they waltzed clumsily down the porch and back while she hummed the rhythm of a slow-moving melody, the side of her face at rest against his chest.

The last cool hours of each evening were reserved for her walk. It was a sixty-year-old habit, and she could name the succession of good dogs she’d kept to provide their silent company.

She explored the treeline above the pastures and downstream as far as the county road, Sammy racing ahead as she came along steadily. She would stop at times, calling him back, and he sat patiently listening to her warnings about porcupines and skunks and mountain lions, her reminders that he was new to this country. He yawned, stretching, nosing her hand before striking out again.

On the third evening out he managed to get sprayed by a
skunk, and Griff helped her scrub him with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking powder and liquid soap. He braced up under the garden hose, allowing it, and just yesterday they’d seen a skunk again, a mother with three kits, and he’d lain flat, whining softly until they passed. So now he knew about skunks, she thought, good for him.

This evening she was searching for morels. She carried a plastic grocery bag and a paring knife, weaving deliberately through the trees a half mile upstream from the barn when Sammy started to bark and she looked up expecting another skunk, and her heart revved and she dropped the knife. She was standing at the edge of a clearing grown up in native grass and lupine, a place where she’d played as a girl. She lowered her hand from where she’d raised it against her chest and bent down to retrieve the knife. In the middle of the meadow was a heap of antlers, gathered bones and horns five feet high and ten feet across. But it was the figures that made her hold her breath.

They stood apart from the mound of bones, a dozen feet or so out from its edges, spaced evenly around the perimeter as though circling. She stood searching each figure for motion; they were that distinct and lifelike in their postures. There were six of them. She could not look away, and when there was only the movement of the wind in the trees she struck out through the waist-high grass and flowers, Sammy staying at her side. “It’s all right,” she whispered. They were still twenty feet away.

The figures were human-sized, five adults—a wolf-headed man, his mouth wide in triumph, she-bear, moose, long-horned bull and bighorn ram—and a single child, its skull reptilian, fragile and snake-fanged. Their knees were cocked, arms extended heavenward, backs arched, one offering up a nugget of agate in its raised hands. On another, a tail curved away in an S, the last of its vertebrae no bigger than a snail’s body. It was as though the earth had thrown up an accumulation of its dead, regathering the parts into this resurrection of creatures.

She stopped at every one of them, fingering a hip, a shoulder, a cage of ribs, discovering how each ceramic bone had been attached to its armature of steel rods with copper wires and rawhide ligatures. The bones were colored ochre, caramel and cinnamon, the figures mostly unadorned. Here, a necklace of raven feathers. There, a bracelet woven of moss and flowers, an anklet of green beads, some figures rendered with more artistry.

She lifted an antler from the pile, then set it back in place. It was real, and the bones of cattle and horses and wild things mixed in with the mound of antlers were real. She imagined Griff carrying them in from the surrounding countryside. The years it must have taken.

On the northmost edge of the meadow she found a split-log bench and sat, her eyes welling with a sense of unexpected peace, her arms and legs gone weak. When her vision blurred the figures seemed to rock and leap, dancing around the heaped-up antlers as though the pile were a kind of shrine. She imagined she could hear the joyful hymns they sang.

She sat until it was too dark to see, and when Sammy whined she stood and shook her head, stomping her feet in the damp night air, feeling the episodes of her life edging back in increments: anger, jealousy, disappointment, pride. The belief of having been in love. It had all been bled away somehow, and she’d been reduced to just a simpler, and quieted, animal. She looked up into the spray of stars.

“No one can know for sure,” she said.

H
E WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY
, the time he always got up in the summer, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat listening. No one was moving in the house. He was used to the racket of McEban in the kitchen, noisy and impatient with the coffeepot, the smell of frying bacon. He walked to the door, cracking it open to listen. Still nothing. He tiptoed to the bathroom at the end of the hall, easing the door shut behind him. He peed against the porcelain above the waterline to avoid the sound of splashing. When he was done he lowered the seat and sat. He worried it would be too loud if he flushed, deciding not to chance it. He hadn’t been here long enough to know the rules.

In his bedroom again he dressed and sat in the desk chair by the window looking out at the empty street below. A boy on a bicycle rode past throwing rolled newspapers from the canvas saddlebags at the back of his bike. Each paper was wrapped in clear plastic, and the boy gripped it by the excess part of the sleeve, swinging it around his head before letting it fly. Like David was supposed to have done with his slingshot. He wanted to rush out of the house, introduce himself, offer to help, but he didn’t. The rules again.

He thought the room must be someone’s office when they
didn’t have a guest. There was a computer on the desk, a Mac like McEban’s, but he didn’t turn it on. Beside the desk were stacks of papers, books and boxes, and he peeked around in one and found a hole-punch, a stapler and padded envelopes, but the snooping just made him more nervous and he left the others untouched. He didn’t want to be caught going through someone’s belongings. There was still no one up in the house.