Bone Fire (4 page)

Now she held the packhorse while Paul lifted the panniers up on each side of the animal, adjusting their straps over the bucks to level them.

“It’ll be a light load.” These were the first words he’d spoken to her.

She heard Kenneth giggle from the porch and wondered which man had made him laugh. Hearing Einar laugh too, she thought she should have people over more often.

“Is your sister home?”

“Should be next week.” He was balancing the posts on top of the panniers, positioning them where they belonged, making sure they wouldn’t rub against the horse’s shoulders. “You can drop that leadrope,” he said. “He’s not going anywhere.”

The gelding stood solidly. He didn’t even shy when they shook the packcover over the posts and it bellied in the wind before they could tuck it behind the sides of the panniers.

“She bought a color printer in Denver,” he said. “Had it UPSed up to the ranch.” He was uncoiling the lashrope. “So she can print up diplomas for the white women who take her classes.” He stood back from the horse. “I’m not tall enough to tie a hitch over all this.”

She went into the granary and returned with a five-gallon
bucket, turning it up by the horse’s side, and he threw the lashrope over and stepped onto the bucket. He steadied himself against the pannier, looking down at her. “She had Kenneth help her think up fake Indian names like Lightning Flower, or Crystal Walker, or whatever she thought might get her a tip on top of tuition.”

Griff handed the cinch back under the horse’s belly, taking up the slack, slinging the pannier on the offside, and taking the slack again. She held tight while he finished the hitch, and when he stepped down from the bucket they backed away to appreciate their work.

“Doesn’t that look exactly like a load of shit,” he said.

“You want to do it over?”

“I don’t know how I would. I guess it’ll look better after we get those posts off and set.” He led the bay in a circle, walking backward to see how the pack rode. “Rita says everybody wants to be Indian if they’re not. You all set?”

“I guess.”

She brought Royal around and they led the horses back through the corrals, stopped at the gate and watched as Kenneth jumped down from the porch, racing to the Russian olive by the corner of the house. He was ducking and feinting, keeping his left arm extended, reaching over his shoulder with his right hand, bringing it forward as though plucking some invisible harp.

“What’s he doing?” she said.

“Killing Orcs. McEban bought him the boxed set of those Middle Earth movies. They’ve watched them six or seven times.”

The boy started to make arrow sounds, the sounds of arrows striking Orcs.

“You think this’ll take us all day?” he asked.

“Are you still mad?”

They were sitting back against the wheel fender now, waiting for McEban to notice and say his good-byes.

“No, I’m okay.”

He was kicking a boot heel back into the divot he’d made in the
soft ground in front of the tire. It was something he used to do as a kid, ten years ago when Rita had moved them in with McEban.

“I know RISD isn’t the only art school in the country,” she said. “If I thought I could go back to school I’d find something in Chicago.”

“Right.”

“I would.”

“It’s too nice a day to fight about this.”

“Or you could stay.”

“In Wyoming?”

“It’d make McEban happy.”

He stepped a boot up against the tire, tightening his spur leather on that one and then the other. “I like it in Chicago.”

“Because the grass is greener?” She couldn’t keep the taunt out of her voice.

“Sometimes the grass is greener.”

“Define greener.”

He turned toward her, leaning into the truck’s sidewall. “Greener’s being able to go out for a beer and not have the rest of the bar waiting for Tonto to get drunk and piss his pants, or pull a knife and go to scalping, and you know goddamn well that’s how it can feel for me here.”

“You got us all ready?” McEban called, coming down off the porch.

“Just waiting on you,” Paul called back.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s too nice a day.”

She stepped to the packhorse while he pulled his chaps from where he’d draped them across the seat of his saddle. He belted them and bent to buckle the leg straps.

“I love you,” she said, watching Kenneth fall in behind McEban, covering his back against attack, Einar standing there at the railing looking on. She knew all he could see were the shapes of them, the movement.

“I know you do.” He stepped up onto his horse.

• • •

They worked in pairs, McEban and Kenneth, she and Paul, repairing the small defects in the fences running west up through the foothills, tightening, splicing, hammering in new staples where they were needed. By late morning they’d gained the bench to the south of Owl Creek, where the elk had crowded up out of the steep drainage, and for the next two hours they all worked together replacing the corner brace and restretching the wire.

Kenneth sliced his palm with the wood chisel and McEban bandaged it with his bandanna and the boy paraded the bloody hand like a gift. They were sweated out and hot, all of them, and the day remained faultless, a dozen swollen white clouds to break up the blue, the wind steady enough to keep the flies down.

“How we doing?” McEban asked. He took a plastic Pepsi bottle filled with water from a saddlebag, drinking half and then passing it over to Kenneth.

“The top two wires are down for about a hundred yards just half a mile west of here,” she told him. “And the corner brace is rotted out.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all of it.”

“Well, shit. I don’t see why you couldn’t have managed this by yourself.”

“I was lonely.” She winked at Kenneth.

“Me too,” Kenneth said.

“You were?” McEban knelt in front of the boy, rewrapping his hand. “Well, then, that’s another matter altogether.”

They led their horses to a shaded spring set high in a depression grown thick with wildflowers, holding the reins away from the animals’ front feet while they drank, pulling the bridles off so they could fan through the tall grass, trailing their halter ropes as they grazed.

They ate their lunches spread out around the spring, and when
they were done McEban lay back with his hat tipped over his eyes, his hands laced behind his head, and Kenneth, lying back against him, pretended to sleep, watching Griff and Paul where they sat together in the sun against the sidehill across from him.

Paul leaned back on his elbows. “Did you hear about the guy Crane found dead in the trailer house?”

“My mom said Crane knows who he is but wouldn’t tell her. She said it was a meth lab.”

“I always thought that could’ve been me,” he said.

She shaded her eyes. “You’ve never done drugs in your life.” She watched him turn the stem of a weed in his fingers, tying it in a knot.

“I mean I expect something like that. I don’t know. Something sudden.”

She hooked a finger in one of his belt loops as though she was afraid he might fade and then vanish entirely, lying back against him, resting her head in the curve of his hip. “From now on I want you to call me Divine Tiger Woman.”

“You want what?”

“Divine Tiger Woman.”

He chuckled, genuinely surprised. “You think that sounds Indian?”

“I think it sounds more Indian than Lightning Whatever. Anyway, she was
East
Indian.”

“And here I was thinking you pulled the name out of your butt.”

She was watching the clouds scud to the east, and their movement made her feel as though she were rolling slowly away from him. She put a hand down to steady herself. “Every man who ever made love to her never had to come back to a lower life.”

“You mean like a prairie dog? Or a worm?”

“You’ve got it.”

He laughed again, enjoying himself, easing out from under her, getting up on his knees.

She squinted against the sun. “You don’t always have to say the
whole thing. When we’re around other people you could shorten it to DTW. Everybody wouldn’t have to know how lucky you are.”

He leaned over her, casting her face in shadow. “What do you think, Kenneth? You think I ought to kiss her?”

When the boy nodded without lifting his head from McEban, Paul kissed her and sat back on his heels.

“I can’t leave him,” she said. “Not the way he is now.”

He pulled a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. “You understand he could live a lot longer.”

“I hope he does.” She cocked an arm under her head. “You writing me a poem?”

“I’m writing down what we did today.” He waved a bee away from his face, watching it dip and sputter toward the creek. “Something about where the fence was down. When we got thirsty and how our mouths tasted like wood. How the horses made out.” He looked across at McEban and the boy. “Maybe something about when Kenneth cut his hand.”

“Like a diary?”

He held the notebook against his thigh, writing. “For Einar. So I won’t forget to tell him. It’s not like he can get out here with us.”

She lay back in the warm, sweet grass, after a bit throwing an arm across her face, over her eyes, in case the tears started. Because sometimes they did when she was filled with the certainty that he was here mostly just for her, to get her started out right, and she’s never once felt it would last her whole life. She rolled her arm just slightly, so she could see his outline against the sun.

C
RANE SHIFTED
his weight against the chairseat, working his knuckles down the tops of his thighs and back along the outsides, and when that didn’t help he stood and paced along the east wall of the waiting room. This new cramping seemed to twist at the muscles deep inside his legs, usually when he was tired or uneasy. He sat down again and leafed through a three-month-old
Smithsonian
. Pictures of a South American rain forest, melting icepacks, the statuary at Angkor Wat. Then the discomfort started tapering off and he tossed the magazine on top of the low table beside the chair.

Two young mothers sat across from him. When he caught their eyes they nodded, smiling earnestly, as people always do with cops, then leaned back together in conversation, lowering their voices, glancing now and then to where their children played in a carpeted corner of the room. Two boys and a girl, all under six, crawling in and out of a high-impact-plastic playhouse, rising up out of the scatter of high-impact-plastic toys, the distraction provided to keep them occupied and forgetful about what was going to come next. Old man Houle was curled forward on an orange plastic chair by the row of windows overlooking the street.

Under the Muzak and the constant squabbling of the children he could hear the hum of fluorescent lighting and closed his eyes,
trying to remember how the old Heyneman Building looked just a year and a half ago, before Sheridan Memorial had it gutted and renovated into this satellite clinic. He could still smell the paint, or something like it, maybe just something antiseptic.

When he’d told Jim and Nancy Tylerson their son was dead, that his body had been terribly burned, that he’d been shot as well and possibly hadn’t suffered too much, not as much as he would’ve if the fire had been what killed him, Nancy slumped against the doorframe of their home and vomited over the front of her sweatshirt. Then she collapsed on the concrete stoop beside the worn brown welcome mat. Jim knelt next to her, holding her until there was nothing left in her stomach. He held her even when it was apparent she had no intention of getting off her hands and knees, or out of the soiled clothing, or of wiping her face. She was wagging her head back and forth, with streams of spittle hanging from her mouth and tangling in her long hair, and Jim said, “I’m going to need some help here.”

It took both of them to get her up and into the house, finally onto the couch in the front room. She flailed and moaned, seeming to weigh twice what he might have guessed, as though her grief had somehow intensified the pull of gravity, drawing her away from them and into the earth.

He sat with her while Jim went into the kitchen to find a damp cloth to clean his wife’s face. For a short while she sobbed quietly, then stiffened and began clawing at him, and he was forced to grip her wrists, pinning them crosswise in her lap, and still she twisted and shrieked that she hoped he’d die just like her son had. Then she spat in his face.

Jim got her to swallow a sleeping pill, and when they felt they could briefly leave her lying on the couch with her eyes wide but unfocused, they went back outside and walked to the curb. They stood by the cruiser, staring into the sky, and he told Jim again how sorry he was. He said there’d been drugs involved and that he didn’t want him to read about it in the paper without already
knowing. Jim nodded, once, then he sat down on the curb. He didn’t weep or curse, just sat there with his head bowed, and after a while he got to his feet and looked back at the house. “I don’t know what I ought to do now,” he said. “I haven’t a clue.”

When Crane heard his name called he got out of the chair. A thick, mannish-looking woman stood in the doorway beside the receptionist’s cubicle, lifting her chin to indicate that he was next, and he followed her down the single hallway and into a windowless white room. She had him step on a scale, then he sat on a stool so she could take his blood pressure and temperature. She asked him to roll up his sleeve.

She thumped at the blood vessel on the inside of his arm and inserted the needle, loosening the rubber tubing she’d cinched around his biceps. They both watched as she filled three vials with his blood, then she had him fold his arm back against a cotton ball.

She got a light blue hospital gown from a drawer and handed it to him. “You’ll need to put this on,” she said.

He had a leg crossed on his knee and was examining a mole on his calf, comparing it to the stage-four mole on the skin-cancer chart hanging on the wall, when Dan walked in, apologizing for the wait.

For the next half hour they talked about their inability to afford the homes they wanted, the sorry rise of evangelical right-wingers and how video games were turning out a generation of surly clerks, while Dan listened to his heart, looked in his ears, eyes and throat, pushed and prodded his abdomen, checked his reflexes, finally pricking him here and there with a pin and asking if he could feel it. Or that’s how it came to be lumped together in his memory, as a single blunted and humiliating episode, but about a hundred times easier than telling a man and woman that the child they’d loved and raised was now lost to them.