Bone Fire Page 5

  She was widening and closing her knees, the movement stirring the bubbles into islands.

  He pushed the bottom sash up a couple of inches, watching the steam bleed out through the opening. “I’m okay.”

  “I forgot,” she said. “I forgot we don’t do that anymore.” She leaned over the side for another sip, the water sheeting and finally beading across the blues, reds and yellows of the tattoo that covered her shoulders. Then she slipped back into the water, with her head gone under and her feet up against the tiles by the faucets.

  When they were new to each other, right after Kenneth was born and Paul was the age Kenneth is now, they’d settle the older boy in his bed and skid the cradle into the hallway outside the bathroom door where they could hear the baby cooing and check on him if he wasn’t. She’d take him by the hand, leading him in to sit with her while she bathed, and they’d talk about how both boys might turn out, and what she imagined she’d do with her life, asking about his past but rarely speaking of her own. When they ran out of conversation, she opened her legs and let him watch as she languidly caressed herself, one hand slowly circling, the other fingers pressing against a nipple and finally squeezing the whole breast, then the other, and he unsnapped his shirt and lowered his pants and pulled at himself just as slowly, watching as she stiffened and rose against her hands, imagining them as his own.

  Afterward he cleaned himself at the sink, gaping stolidly at the big, grateful, unmarried son of a bitch in the fogged mirror, still fumbling with his pants and shirt and feelings of mild indecency. He never once believed it would go on like this forever, thinking of it as a sort of prelude, but after two years it finally occurred to him that nothing more interesting was likely to happen, that their evenings together in the bathroom held no more significance for her than the occasional load of laundry she washed and dried. She was just helping out.

  He still masturbates, alone at night in his bed, but not for the pleasure of it. Now he jacks off so he can sleep.

  She rose up out of the water sputtering, smoothing her hair back, and drank from the glass again. “I’ll bet you’re wondering what the Guides are thinking,” she said.

  “I wasn’t, but that’d be fine.”

  She settled and closed her eyes, pinching her nose and then inhaling through the left nostril, clamping it shut, exhaling through the right. Back and forth. It’s a technique she’d spent some time trying to teach him, but it only left him feeling uncomfortably lightheaded.

  She dropped her hand away, breathing in heavily. The bubbles were completely gone from the water’s surface and her breasts bobbed in front of her tucked chin. “They’re ready.”

  “I guess I could hear something about Paul,” he said. “If they’re willing.”

  Her face tightened in concentration, in seriousness, and he turned to see a raven outside the window, cawing from the branches of an apple tree.

  “Family questions are the hardest,” she said.

  The bird shifted black and silver in a shaft of sunlight, mottled where the leaves shadowed its shoulders, and she turned the faucet off with a foot without opening her eyes. There was just the sound of the overflow draining.

  “This will be his last lifetime,” she said. “They say he’s filled with the immutable soul of the divine.”

  “They actually said immutable?” He was wondering if Kenneth was done setting the dam above the knob in the east pasture, but didn’t feel he could just get up and go check. “What about Griff, then?”

  The strain showed in her face. She spread a hand on her belly. “She’s not pregnant.”

  “That isn’t what I was thinking about.” He leaned over and took another sip of tequila and put the glass back. He wanted to see if it was better the second time around. “I was only wondering if she and Paul might get married sometime.”

  “They say it’s not yet determined.”

  The steam was mostly cleared from the room.

  “They say there’re obstacles for the female. That she’s caught in a muddied vibration. Don’t you want to ask about Kenneth?”

  “I don’t worry about Kenneth.”

  “You could ask the Guides about yourself if you wanted.”

  “I don’t worry much about me, either.”

  She scratched the inside of her left thigh and, bringing her leg up, her calf.

  He stood from the toilet. “I need to help that boy with the water. I shouldn’t have let him out there by himself.”

  She opened her eyes. “You used to ask about us. About you and me.”

  “I already know something about that.”

  Her hand still rested on her belly. “I always think about you, Barnum. When I’m gone I always do.”

  “I believe you.” He was standing over her now, looking down at her hair floating in dark fans to the sides of her face.

  “Our souls are entwined.” Her voice was even and patient, as though she was instructing a child. “They were even before we met. Can’t you feel it?”

  At the window a pair of pale-blue butterflies now dipped, guttering in a slight breeze.

  “No,” he said, “I can’t.”

  She crossed her ankles, turning her legs out. “If we allowed ourselves the luxury of intimacy on this physical plane”—she swept her arm through the air to indicate the room, or the house, or the whole universe—“it would shatter our sacred union.”

  “Is that what your Guides say?”

  “It’s a fact my heart knows for certain.”

  He looked down at his feet. They were pale and dirty and he meant to shower before he went to bed, in his small upstairs bathroom. “I just wonder sometimes why you bother to drive back here like you do.”

  She sat straight up in the tub, shivering. “Would you close that window?”

  He did.

  “I come home because I miss you and Kenneth. And the ranch.” She started the hot water again, dropping some bath beads in under the stream. “It’s important to me to be from somewhere.”

  When he didn’t say anything she looked up at him. She’d worked her face into a convincing expression of contrition, the kind that gets her a day’s extension on the grocery coupons she’s let expire.

  “A thing’s always sweeter when you miss it.” She reached out and took his hand, pulling him toward her, guiding the hand to a breast, holding it there. “You can’t miss something if you have it all the time.”

  He nodded, imagining how clumsy he must appear, hunched over, his knees angled into the porcelain rim of the tub, his free hand hanging uselessly at his side.

  “Can you feel my heart?”

  “Yes, I can.” He wasn’t sure he’d spoken aloud.

  “I love you in my heart.” She smiled full tilt, and when he thought he might tip forward he drew his hand away, wiping it on his shirttail as he straightened. He stood watching as she finished the tequila, her head thrown back, her throat smooth as jade.

  “Would you be a sweetheart and fix me another?” She extended the glass, a drift of new bubbles rolling back along her thighs. “Maybe two wedges of lime this time?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have we got plenty?”

  “I bought half a dozen.”

  In the hallway he poured the remaining ice out of the glass into his mouth. Hearing her shut the water off again, he swallowed a trickle of melted ice, feeling as hollow as he had when he was just nineteen and his mother had left and he’d found his father sitting dead in the barn in his only suit, the pistol in his lap, his brains blown back against the upright stanchion and along the length of weathered lumber at the side of the stall. He felt he could understand how something like that might happen.

  Seven

  GRIFF ROLLED to the edge of the bed and sat blinking. She was gummy with sweat, logy, and it took a moment before she could straighten up into the half dark and reel through the clothing they’d left scattered across the floor and finally into the bathroom. She ran water in the sink until it turned icy, drawn up fro
m the bottom of the well shaft, and held the insides of her wrists under the faucet. And then she drank.

  She returned to the bedroom toweling her neck, beneath her arms and breasts, and threw the towel back into the bathroom. She’d been angry when they’d made love, grasping, careless, crying out as someone drowning might, and afterward, when she was still upset, they’d made love again. Now he slept turned on his side, his knees drawn up, with a panel of moonlight on his back, the headboard and the night table.

  She slipped into a robe, knotting the sash loosely, and pulled the sheet from under his legs. She covered him, set the portable fan up on the chest at the foot of the bed and turned it on. He shivered and drew the sheet over his shoulder.

  In the front room she found a cup of yogurt in the refrigerator and sat at the table next to the open windows that looked out over the porch. She bent a leg underneath to sit up higher in the chair, scooping the yogurt into her mouth with a forefinger. She hadn’t turned on a light, and in this darkened room the memories of Ansel Magnuson here in the evenings with his zwieback and herring and schnapps were unavoidable. And then she thought of Mitch Bradley in the bunkhouse at Einar’s. Two honest bachelors hired by these separate families, consigning their lifetimes’ work as though this were part of the adoption process, finally dying with the achievement of being remembered not as trusted strangers but as blood.

  She mopped her forehead with the hem of the robe, the smell of her heated body rising into her face, and she couldn’t think of a single thing left in this world that held the good animal scent of Ansel or Mitch.

  She’d never been comfortable in the summer’s heat and wondered how people managed in Mississippi or Louisiana or Latin America, and maybe it was the heat that had sparked their argument, but it still was a variation of the same fight they’d been having for the last year, this episode peculiar only because of the application she’d found in his printer. She was sitting at the kitchen table reading through the paperwork when Paul came in from his run. She held up the top sheet.

  “Uganda? You’re applying for a year in Uganda?”

  She looked back at the form, trying to find an exact date, and he peeled his T-shirt over his head.

  “It’s just an application.”

  “Were you going to mention it, or just send me a postcard?”

  He took the pitcher of ice water out of the refrigerator and poured a glass, drinking it down all at once, squeezing his eyes shut against the sharp pain that spiked between his brows, then pressed the heel of his free hand against his forehead.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  He nodded, dropping the hand and leaning back against the counter. “They want me to do a statistical analysis of rural HIV patients. If I get it.” He poured another glass full. “My thesis advisor suggested it. He said there’s no problem in finishing my master’s when I get back.” He wiped his mouth with the T-shirt. “Anyway, I don’t see what difference it makes where I go. You weren’t going to come to Chicago, so now you won’t come to Africa.”

  “Fuck you.” She stood out of the chair. “I could visit you in Chicago.”

  “So visit me in Africa.”

  “For what, a weekend? How long do you think I can leave Einar?”

  He sat down at the table and she walked out onto the porch. She screamed, and again even louder, then slammed the screen door when she came back in. “Did you even stop to wonder how I might feel about it?”

  “It’s a chance to do something I think’s important.”

  “And when I want to take care of my grandfather, that’s what? A waste of my life?”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  The application was spread across the table and she snatched a page, wadded it up and pitched it hard against his chest, at the same time suffering that peculiar dislocation of having been standing to the side and watching herself react like a child. She placed her hands on the table, leaning toward him. Her voice came out choked. “I don’t give a shit where you go.”

  He reached across the table, taking her hands, holding on to them. He was smiling. “Not even the tiniest little pinch of shit?”

  Unlike her, he couldn’t stay mad, and that’s why arguing rarely got them anywhere.

  She shifted on the chair in the darkness. Beyond the porch, McEban’s house stood unlighted and vague in the distance, but a light was on in Rita’s Airstream, parked along the south side of the house, and the moonlight was sparkling in sweeps across the irrigated pastures, glowing on the stones spaced along the drive.

  She tried to envision her father’s face because she found it comforting to imagine that the dead might care for her. She pictured them waiting—thousands of years’ worth of souls—with their arms outstretched, welcoming.

  When she drives the two-lanes that wind through the Bighorns she often stops to sit beside the descansos erected in the borrow ditches. Simple crosses, some hung with wreaths of plastic flowers, once a teddy bear, once a baseball glove, almost always a message of loss: Look homeward, Angel. If tears could build a stairway to Heaven. Your memory is my treasure. She wonders what she might write to mark the place where her father died. Something to let him know she does not mourn.

  She stood and started toward the kitchen, stopping abruptly when she heard the porchboards grind, and when a dark figure rose at the window her heart spiked and her legs jerked her backward.

  “Did I scare you?” Just a whisper through the screening.

  She leaned into the table, her right leg still pumping, cocked up on the ball of her foot. She’d nearly fallen.

  “Hell yes, you scared me.” She bent the leg up, digging at a cramp in her calf. “What are you doing out there?”

  “Nothing.” He bobbed up higher, spreading his arms and moaning like a cartoon ghost.

  “Goddamnit, Kenneth, get in here.”

  The front door screeched on its hinges when he stepped into the room. “Were you thinking about something scary?” He was giggling.

  “I was thinking about my dad.”

  She opened the refrigerator, and they squinted against the light.

  “You want to go riding?”

  “I’ll bet you sneak down here all the time, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes I do.” He looked toward the bedroom. “Uncle Paul never notices. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She set the yogurt back in the refrigerator and closed the door.

  “Do you?” he asked.

  “Do I what?”

  “Want to go riding?”

  “Now?”

  “It’s too hot to sleep,” he said.

  He waited while she dressed, and they walked through the dappled shadows the moon cast through the cottonwoods along the creek bottom, then over a plank footbridge to the barn, the chirring of crickets and the rush of water loud in the darkness, their footfalls muffled in the duff.

  He had a brown-and-white pinto bridled, the reins looped over a corral pole, and as they approached he chanted, “There now, there now,” so the horse wouldn’t shy, but his voice was so childishly shrill it sounded like the call of a night bird.

  “We can both ride Spencer,” he told her.

  The horse nuzzled his broad forehead into the boy’s chest, pushing him back a step, and he turned the animal against the side of the corral.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “McEban says our dog could ride Spencer.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “He meant if we did.”

  She stepped to the horse’s flank, resting an arm across his hips. “It’ll just take a minute to saddle him.”

  “He’s good to go the way he is,” he said, and the horse nickered softly, as if to vouch for him.

  She stood up onto the second rail, sidestepping to the horse’s withers and swinging a leg over. Kenneth still stood on the ground, reaching out to her, and she gripped his wrist, pulling him up behind her. He was light as a cat, all bone and sinew and eagerness, and the
horse hadn’t even raised his head, standing like he’d gone to sleep.

  “I told you he was okay,” the boy said.

  They wove through the trees on the north side of the creek, the old horse plodding, occasionally grunting in complaint, and Kenneth sat pressed against her, his arms encircling her waist.

  “How far do you want to go?” she asked, but he was right, she felt refreshed, contented, her arms and face cooling, as though her body’s heat was wicking out into the mottled night. She felt him shift, looking past her to get his bearings.

  “Not much farther.” He pressed a cheek against her shoulder blade. “I’m a little bit afraid of the dark,” he admitted, and then: “Do you think my mom’s crazy?”

  The horse snorted at a downfall and balked before stepping over. They gripped tighter with their knees.

  “What do you think?”

  “If she is crazy it’s probably okay.”

  “Then I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s what I think.” He looked around her again. “Once, in a book I read, it said a kid would be okay if there was just one person to watch out for him.” He was whispering. “The book was in the counselor’s office at school.”

  “What were you doing there?” She raked her heels along the horse’s ribs, and he quickened his pace.

  “It was because I hit Ricky Wheeler in the neck. He’s the one who said my mom was crazy, but I didn’t tell the counselor that was why and Ricky didn’t either. I had to apologize to the whole class.” He unclasped his hands, pointing ahead to a clearing. “Up there,” he said.

  Then they were out of the trees and the air grew warmer, their shadows falling away to the right, lumped together and following them through the tall meadow grass.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure I can.” She felt him leaning into her.

  “Rodney isn’t just my mom’s friend. He’s my real dad.”

  He’d made the statement as plainly as if reading from a book in a counselor’s office. “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody did. I figured it out by myself, but I don’t want you to tell McEban.”