Bone Fire Page 3

  Paul stayed with the horses, and when McEban was close enough she called, “Coffee’s still hot.”

  He stopped short of the steps, thumbing his hat back from his face, Kenneth doing the same with the bill of his cap. They both were smiling. “I’m all coffeed up,” he said.

  “How about you, Kenneth? Would you like a glass of milk?”

  “I’m all milked up.”

  He was grinning clownishly, and she had to ask him to repeat himself because he’d become so tickled he hadn’t gotten the words out clearly on the first try. Then she said, “I’ll be ready in a flash.”

  “You can take your time if you want.” McEban checked his watch. “It’s early yet.”

  Einar stepped through the screen door behind her carrying the sack lunches she’d packed and left on the counter. His shirt was neatly buttoned at his throat and he wore his town hat, walking more assuredly, less stooped, than when it was just the two of them. He thrust his jaw toward McEban. “I see you’re still about as thick as a skinned ox.”

  “Hey yourself, you old bastard.” McEban plucked a can of Copenhagen from his shirt pocket and pinched out a dab. “You operating a catering business now in your dotage?”

  Einar held the bags out to Griff, who took them in both hands. “I’m her silent partner,” he said, lowering himself into a porch chair. “My part of the deal here is to keep quiet and watch her get the work done.”

  McEban settled the tobacco behind his lip, brushing his fingers against his pants while Kenneth worked his tongue around his bottom front teeth like he was adjusting a chew of his own.

  “That must be Mr. Kenneth you’ve brought with you.”

  McEban stared down at the boy as though surprised to find him there. “Why, yes sir, it seems like it must be.”

  “Say something so I know McEban’s not lying.”

  The boy stepped up onto the worn timber of the lowest step. “We got a new colt at the sale barn in Sheridan last week,” he announced. “If he works out he’s going to be mine and nobody else’s.”

  He looked back at McEban, making sure the statement wasn’t inflated, and Griff started toward the horses, pinching the boy’s arm as she passed, feeling lucky to have always enjoyed the company of men.

  McEban dragged a chair next to Einar’s and Kenneth sat up on the railing, straight-backed and attentive, swinging his legs.

  “She ask you about coffee?” Einar asked.

  “I guess I’m over the coffee part of the day.”

  The early light made their hands and faces appear glassy and little used, and Einar strained over his lap to have a better look at the boy, finally relaxing back into the chair, pulling his glasses off and holding them against his leg. The kid’s image held clearly in his mind and he wished Mitch was sitting here with him, with his better eyesight and easy humor, and then he felt embarrassed that this good morning wasn’t enough for him without summoning the dead. He closed his eyes, trying to remember anything of what it was like to have been a boy, and what came to him was how each day had emerged as though freshly coined, and endless. He remembered the safety he’d felt under the care of his parents, and the cowboys who’d worked for them, primarily Simon Samuelson, but also Karl Tibbetts and J. L. Manz. He remembered the hours spent studying those hired men, listening to damn near everything they cared to say, supposing the example of their lives would offer up a blueprint for what it might take for him to become a man. He still missed every one of them but had no expectation of joining their number. It was his belief that those who were gone convened in the minds of the living as merely flashes of familiar light. He didn’t imagine heaven anything like his mother had, as some potluck in the basement of a Lutheran church, but he maintained specific memories of those he cared for and expected Griff to remember him. If she did, he thought that might prove sufficient in terms of an afterlife.

  He heard the boy whisper a question and McEban stand out of his chair, spitting over the railing. “I don’t know,” he said, “I guess you could go in the house or just down there off the end of the porch if you can’t wait.”

  Einar watched the boy wriggling away from them, working at his zipper. “When I was a young fella,” he said, trying to make it come out as simply informational, “I used to have to hook it under that railing not to piss in my eyes.” That was how J. L. Manz had told it, with just a hint of regret in his voice. “Now I’m left with laying it across the top rail so I don’t piss on my shoes.”

  The boy tried out a laugh but wasn’t completely sure what had been funny, looking at McEban for a clue. He was standing knock-kneed, hunched over his belt buckle.

  “Just go on,” McEban said. “We can talk about it later.” And then, to Einar, “I don’t suppose I’ll have to explain gravity to him ever again.”

  Paul led the bay through the corrals and Griff fell in beside him. Against their silence, the resonant bass of the creek, the ascending notes of a single meadowlark and the soft, fleshy chitter of the cottonwoods kept lively in the morning downdraft. She thought to reach out to take his hand but wouldn’t, and that set up an itch, a slight but specific panic like wanting a cigarette and not having one. It was a feeling she liked.

  Royal stood ahead of them, saddled and tied to a rail where the corrals met the corner of the barn, nickering at their approach. Leaning against the side of the barn were two wooden posts, a length of four-by-four-inch lumber for a cross brace, a bundle of steel posts and, tucked beneath them, two box panniers with a packcover and lashrope laid across the top.

  She’d been out at dawn, packing the panniers with a half-used spool of barbed wire, sacks of staples and clips, a come-along, the Swede saw, spikes, a hammer and chisel, fencing pliers and a driver for the steel posts. She’d stood quietly picturing where the fence was down and exactly what would be required to mend it. Then she’d repacked each pannier, padding all the loose tools with burlap sacking, hefting first one and then the other to balance their weights.

  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.

  Five

  CRANE 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 wal
l 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.