Bone Fire (2 page)

After supper she stacked the dishes in the sink, and when he lit a cigarette she brought him the glass ashtray from the cupboard over the refrigerator.

“I don’t know how you can smoke just one and not want another.” She reached forward with a wadded-up paper napkin, brushing a crumb from the gray-and-white stubble on his chin.

“I wish I enjoyed it more.” He scooted his chair back enough to cross one leg over the other, biting down on the filter and adjusting his glasses so he wouldn’t miss the ashtray. “I feel like I’m letting him down.”

There was the rich smell of ground coffee, the fading odors of their meal, the peppery scent of tobacco. She was leaning into the counter watching the blue smoke rise into the still room, her weight over her left hip, her arms gone slack—a posture she affects when she’s worn down and the day’s not yet done. It’s how a horse stands, resting, and how, as a young girl, she’d been standing in Mitch’s cabin half listening as the doctor told him that nothing
else he had would outlast his lungs, that his kidney would most likely be what quit him first. Mitch winked at her, working his shoulders back against the pillows to get himself more upright in bed. “This here,” he gestured toward the doctor, “is a blessing.” And then: “Lucky Strikes is what I like. Maybe next time Einar gets to town.”

She brought two cups of coffee to the table and sat across from her grandfather, pulling the cigarette from between his fingers. She took a drag, then another, and handed it back. His eyes appeared yellowed and outsized behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“The fence is down on the south side of Owl Creek.” She sipped her coffee.

“Down bad?”

“I’ll get Paul and McEban to help.” She picked at the cuff of his shirtsleeve, and tapped his wrist and stood up from her chair. “You’re missing a button there.”

She rummaged around in the tool drawer in the kitchen, and when she sat back down she had a packet of needles and a spool of thread and a spare button. He stubbed the cigarette out and folded his glasses into his shirt pocket, keeping his elbow tucked to his ribs.

“You ready?” she asked, and when he didn’t look at her she asked again. He seemed older to her now, more diminished than he had even nine months ago. She puffed her cheeks and blew out, waiting. “I’m sorry you can’t take care of your own fencing. I’m sorrier than you are.”

She dragged her chair around, waiting until he was done pouting to lift his arm away and settle it on her knees. “At least we’ll be fencing more grass than we need.” She spoke with her head down over the mending, and when he didn’t respond she bit off the thread above where she’d knotted it and replaced the needles and thread back in the drawer, then started the water in the sink.

“Your mother called this afternoon.” He was fingering his new button, testing it.

“Does she want me to call her back?”

He sipped his coffee, grimaced, then blew on it. “I believe she just called to tell me you’d lose your scholarship if you don’t go back to school.”

“Well, she’s wrong.” She felt her face flush and turned back to the dishes.

He tried his coffee again, then set it back down. “My sister might come for a visit.”

She shut the water off and stood drying her hands. “Really?”

“McEban found an article about her on his computer. Then he found her phone number.”

“And you called her?”

He nodded. “Last week.”

She watched him turn toward the living room, perhaps imagining he’d heard someone there, and thought she might get a dog again, if only for the noise a dog would make. “Do you think she’ll come?”

He was still looking into the other room. “You mean Marin?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t say.” He pushed back from the table, squinting at her. “I’m ready for bed now.”

She helped him take his boots off, leaving the room so he could get out of his clothes. When she returned he was under the bedcovers, propped up against a drift of pillows. He’d swung a foot-wide magnifying glass between his face and the book he held open at his waist, the lens attached to a hinged metal arm mounted to the wall above his nightstand.

“I could get you large-print books from the library,” she said.

“That doesn’t have to happen just yet.”

He lowered the book to his lap and she pulled a chair close to the bed, thinking about all the hard conditions under which old men can die, but mostly of Mitch, lying for two years in his cabin
just thirty-seven steps out the mudroom door. Reading his John D. MacDonald novels, reading them over again, enjoying his Lucky Strikes and the coffee and chocolates she brought him each morning. Their regimen of small pleasures to provide some relief from the constant speculation about which organ might fail enough to cause them all to cave in.

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.”

C
RANE 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.