Wide Open (15 page)

“What about the Badlands?” Boyd brushed crumbs off the table into his hand and dropped them on his plate.

“Almost went once, but … something happened,” she finished lamely.
My mother died
. “You?”

“Once. Wouldn’t go back. It’s like … chaos, like chaos given form.”

And you sure as shit wouldn’t like that,
Hallie thought, looking at his immaculate uniform, wondering what it took to be that neat all the time.

She had to snatch the bill out from under Boyd’s hand in order to pay it, but he gave in with grace, which she appreciated.

Hallie heard the rumble of distant thunder again as she and Boyd walked out of Cleary’s to his car. The sky above them had cleared, however. The wind was brisk and cool, but the sun took some of the edge off. West, toward the ranch, Hallie could still see clouds, like a line between daylight and twilight.

16

Twenty minutes later, they crested the slow rise just east of the ranch. Their conversation had lagged again, but Hallie found the silence companionable. As it stretched, though, she started to wonder what it was about him. What had Prue been trying to tell her, anyway? Something about Boyd? That he was an “operator,” like her dad had said? Because he was always showing up, always helpful. What did he want?

Then—

“Shit.” Smoke, a dark band of it, rose straight up into the sky, muted against the flat gray of the clouds, but clearly smoke from something burning.

Boyd’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Is that—?”

“Shit,” Hallie said again.

Boyd flipped on the lights and the siren and stomped on the gas so that they flew over a couple of small dips in the road, the car thunking once and then smoothing as the road did. Boyd reached for the radio, but Hallie stayed him. “No,” she said. “Wait. It’ll take them an hour to get here. We might as well see what’s—if it’s, you know, worth it.”

He spared a glance at her, then concentrated on the road. Hallie didn’t think. It could be a tractor fire or a trash fire. It wouldn’t be a prairie fire with the rain they’d had lately. It could be—

Don’t think.

Boyd entered the yard in a swirl of dust and gravel. The smoke wasn’t coming from the house or the big equipment shed or the horse barn set farther down the lane. Hallie was out of the car and headed around the tractor shed, not sure what she’d find. She stopped at the corner of the building. The old toolshed, the one where her father stored broken fence posts and unused cattle chains and old hafts from axes, picks, and shovels was spectacularly on fire.

“Dad!” Hallie’s father was throwing dirt on the flames or digging a break around the shed or—probably—both at once. He looked at her, his eyes wide, then waved her to his right.

“Over there!” he shouted. Something exploded in the center of the shed with a loud crack! Hallie’s father ducked his head and went right on pitching dirt.

Jesus.

Hallie turned away to find a shovel, but Boyd was already there, handing her one of the two in his hand and running down to the shed. He shouted something into the radio mike attached to his shirt, but Hallie couldn’t make out what he was saying.

The wind was from the west, which was not good because the big tractor shed and the house were both downwind. Boyd and her father were already working between the toolshed and the tractor shed. There was a narrow lane between the two as well, and if the wind stayed low, it might slow the fire down. There was moisture in the air, moisture in the clouds above them. Be damned nice if it rained.

Forty minutes later, they had the fire almost under control and, coincidentally, the firefighters arrived. Hallie’s father pitched a final shovelful of dirt on the smoldering wreckage of the old toolshed and stepped back for the volunteer firefighters—most of them men and women Hallie and her father had known all their lives—to drag the big hose from the truck. Hallie’s father tipped his hat off his head and wiped his face with the same hand, leaving a shallow gray streak through the dark soot covering most of his face.

“What the hell, Dad? What happened?” Hallie asked as she followed him back to the big open door of the tractor shed.

Her father hawked and spit, wiped at his eyes, and gestured her farther upwind of the smoke and away from the loud roar of the fire truck engine as the firefighters started up the pump.

“I was working in the tractor shed when I smelled the smoke.”

“What started it?”

“Hell, if I know.”

The fire chief, Haxton Blake, who was also the mayor of Old Prairie City—mostly referred to by the locals as Old PC—and who owned the Silver Dove, a diner that pretty much got by serving coffee, beer, and the best fried doughnuts in six counties, approached. “It’s pretty much done,” he said to Hallie’s father, “but we’ll leave the little truck here and a couple of folks to watch things for you.”

“’Preciate it, Hack,” her father said. He and Haxton nodded to each other, and Hallie’s father watched as the fire chief walked back down to talk to the others, then stared for a few minutes longer at the pile of charred timber that marked the remains of the old toolshed, a shed, Hallie knew, that he’d been threatening to pull down for ten years.

“Where you been?” he asked without actually looking over at her.

Hallie gestured vaguely. “Up to town. Truck wouldn’t start.” She looked around for Boyd, having lost track of him in the chaos of the fire trucks and the smoke and everything else. He came around the far corner of the smoldering shed, stopped to talk to Kate Wannamaker, who was raking out the dirt and then headed back toward Hallie and her father. His crisp white shirt was crumpled and streaked with gray and brown.

Hallie’s father cleared his throat, the sound harsh and rough. “I’m going to go head down and water the bison,” he said. “You want to make sure the yearlings up the south pasture get fed?” He was walking away before he finished, didn’t even wait for an answer, busy getting away.

“You okay?” Boyd asked as he approached.

“Yeah.” She would have said more, quite possibly something regretful, because she was getting damned tired of him asking her that question, but Haxton returned and said, “Your daddy gone?”

Hallie scrubbed at her scalp. She felt as if she were coated in grease and gritty at the same time. “Yeah, he went to the back field to—”

“There’s no electric to that shed, is there?” Hack interrupted her. Her whole life, she didn’t remember him ever letting her finish a whole sentence.

“No, never has been,” she said.

“Yeah. Huh.”

“Is there a problem?” Boyd asked.

Hallie looked at him, was this any of his business? Then—oh yeah, he was a deputy sheriff.

“It looks funny is all,” Hack said, looking back over his shoulder at the shed.

“Like it was deliberate?” Boyd asked.

“Jesus! Watch where you’re swinging that thing!” Hack yelled at one of the firefighters who was hauling a second length of hose from one of the trucks to the smoldering fire. He turned back to Boyd. “No accelerants. At least I’m not smelling gas or kerosene. And the burn patterns … well, it’s just odd is all.”

“Could it be lightning?” she asked. “I heard thunder earlier.” Although it didn’t look like it had rained.

Hack scratched the back of his head. Boyd looked at her and frowned. Like he was—what?—worried? She could take care of herself.

“I don’t see how it could have been lightning. Though, I got to admit—” He shook his head as though trying to remember something lurking just out of reach. “I’ll check with the weather service. Hey—,” he began as if he was going to ask a question, only to be interrupted.

“Everyone okay?” It was Cass Andersen. Hallie looked back through the tractor shed to see that besides Cass’s big old Suburban, there were three trucks and a car, all pulled up into the yard. Not that they’d come together—they’d probably seen the smoke or heard the call on the scanner.

“We’re fine,” Hallie said. She hated that question, always had.

Cass stepped back and looked at her. She looked at Hack. “You all right?” she said to him.

Hack waved a hand toward the shed. “It’s all good. Thank everyone for coming out, but we got it.”

Hack walked away without saying,
See you
or
Stay away from that shit, it’s hot,
or even
Hey
to Cass or Hallie. He was already shouting at someone down by the shed. Boyd put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed it once, then walked away, too, back to his car to write up a report or down to help with cleanup or … well, Hallie didn’t know what.

“Come up to the house with me,” Cass said briskly.

Hallie considered arguing with her, wanted to go hide in the back fields herself, but it wasn’t worth it. Up at the house, she busied herself getting out pitchers and plastic cups and told Cass where to find the lemonade and iced tea mixes. Cass talked the whole time.

“My god, what does he do? Alphabetize everything? This isn’t a kitchen, it’s a filing system. You ought to just mess things up once in a while, see what he’d do.”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Hallie said. She filled a mug with water, drank half of it in an attempt to ease the raw dryness in her throat from the smoke. She rubbed the corner of her brow with the back of her hand. Her hands, probably her face, too, were covered with soot and grime. She left the kitchen while Cass was talking about something that had happened to someone two towns over some month and a half ago and went into the downstairs bathroom.

It took a lot of scrubbing to get the dirt off and beat back the stink of smoke from her hands. When she was finished, her hair was sticking up in front in short damp spikes. She walked out of the bathroom, still wiping her hands with a towel, and almost ran into Boyd.

“Jesus!” she said. “What are you doing?”

He spread his hands, as if that would make him nonthreatening—as if he was threatening, which he wasn’t—just dangerous in some way Hallie hadn’t figured out yet. His hands were clean; he must have washed them in the kitchen or the utility sink in the tractor shed. His shirt, which had been so crisp and bright an hour ago, looked beyond salvage. There was a long streak of gray black soot down the left front, rucking up the button-down pocket and ending in a large damp splotch, like he’d wiped his hand, or someone had grabbed him there. The hem of his shirt cuffs had turned completely black, so that it looked as if they’d always been that color. Though he’d washed his face, he still had a dark smudge just underneath his right cheekbone, and it made him look like a kid who’d been playing by the creek.

“I came to see if you were all right,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said dryly. “I’m swell. I started a fight, almost got arrested, my truck doesn’t run, and I just put out a fire. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day so far. How about you?”

His lips twitched. “All right,” he said. Hallie wanted to look him in the eye, but her gaze kept being drawn back to his watch. It was clunky and black and too big for his wrist, and it seemed important, like it would tell her secrets if only she knew the right questions.

“Look,” he said, “I think—” He stopped talking so abruptly that Hallie looked up. He was stock-still, staring at the dining room wall. Hallie followed his gaze, but there wasn’t anything shocking there—an old sideboard badly in need of refinishing with a couple of framed posters that her mother had bought a long time ago: a mountain lion and a panther, the latter a Major Felten print, sleek black cat crawling through tall grass, and the former a mountain lion in nearly the same pose, climbing straight down a rocky outcropping deep in the Badlands. Three art deco lead glass vases sat in a neat row underneath the posters. When her mother was alive, they’d been filled with wildflowers or tulips or daffodils, depending on the season, with silk flowers in the winter, with river rocks or Christmas candy a couple of memorable times. They’d been empty for years.

“Boyd?” Hallie said after a minute.

“I—” His gaze drifted back to the sideboard. “I have to get back to town,” he said. He started toward the kitchen, but turned back at the doorway. There was something stark about his features, about the look in his eye. “Be careful,” he said. “Don’t—” He raised his watch hand, and she thought he was going to point at her or at the pictures on the wall, but his radio crackled to life right then, the dispatcher asking him to radio in his status.

When his radio conversation was finished, he said, “See you around.”

Then he was gone.

“Okay,” Hallie said to the empty room. “You bet.”

17

“They all gone?”

It was dark by the time her father came down out of the fields, the sun long gone behind thick clouds and the light fading out of the sky like it just couldn’t hold itself up any longer.

“You see anybody?”

“Don’t be pissed at me,” he said, rubbing degreaser on his hands at the kitchen sink while cold water ran from the faucet.

Hallie pulled a glass dish covered with plastic wrap from the refrigerator, took a sniff, and decided that the meat loaf was still good. She removed the plastic wrap and stuck the meat loaf in the microwave. “Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “I got a whole list.”

Their supper consisted of the meat loaf, some warmed-over potatoes, and a dubious tomato that Hallie sliced and put on a plate, but neither of them ate. For the first time since she’d been home, the dining room table seemed empty, the whole room spare and lean, though it held the dining room table, six straight-backed chairs, the sideboard with her mother’s posters above it, and two small side tables underneath the windows. Maybe it was the light, she thought, that made it seem old and empty. Or maybe it was just the mood. Her father cleaned his plate, cleared the dishes, and came back to the table with a bottle of beer in his hand.

“That dessert?” Hallie asked.

He didn’t answer, just sat and stared at the label on the bottle. “Weirdest thing,” he finally said. “That shed going up. Just went up like … nothing.”