Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

He watched her squeeze the paper even tighter. “When we were married? You were afraid of me?”

“Yes, I was.”

“I never laid a hand on you.” He was massaging the bad arm, watching her place the scraps precisely on top of the boom box, still holding the towel across her breasts.

“But it felt like you wanted to. Like you had to remind yourself not to.”

They heard a truck pull to the curb in front of the house.

“That must be your sprinkler guy,” he said.

“Can you turn around?”

“What?”

“I need to get dressed.”

He stared at the mountains. “Maybe what you felt was something I brought home with me? From being a cop?”

“Maybe that’s all it was,” she said. “It was a long time ago. We were very, very young.”

The sound of a truckdoor closing, the drop of a tailgate.

“You never felt like that with Larry? I mean uneasy.”

“I guess living with Larry’s kind of like a diet without meat.”

She stepped to his side. She had her top on now and the towel wrapped around her waist. They could see the cab of a white truck over the fence.

“I must’ve been feeling homesick or something,” he said.

Her smile had a certain ease, a coziness that reminded him of an apartment they’d rented in their twenties.

“Will you turn off the hose on your way out?”

“Sure I will.”

“It was good to see you.”

“You too.”

“Tell the sprinkler guy I’ll be out in a minute.”

“All right.”

She turned, circling his neck with her bare arms, and pulled him against her. Her chin just cleared his shoulder, the wind catching in her hair, fanning it into his face. It smelled like he remembered, like when they were just kids, in high school.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Truly I am.”

He raised his arms like he might embrace her, then let them drop to his sides. “Thank you,” he said.

She stepped back and the dog got to its feet, its lips bunched in a soundless snarl.

“At least you didn’t get bitten.”

She had her sunglasses on again, and he could see his reflection in their lenses. He looked worn out.

GRIFF HAD PROMISED to help stack the first cutting of alfalfa at the Rocking M and got up in the dark, and when Einar heard her in the kitchen he dressed and went out and sat under the overhead light at the table. He could feel the warmth of it on his head, the muffled agitation of the miller moths circling against the bright globe.

They listened to the weather and the ranch report on the radio, having a breakfast of toast and jam and coffee, and then he became anxious she might leave without speaking to him.

“I like it that McEban still square-bales his hay,” he said.

“What?”

“I said, I like it that-”

“You mean, that he didn’t go to those big round bales like everybody else?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Me too,” she said. “I like how the square bales look when they’re stacked.”

“The shadows they throw.” He felt better now that they’d spoken. “In the winter.”

She fixed him a plate of leftover ham and green beans for his supper, stretching plastic wrap over the plate, then sliced a tomato, a cucumber and onion into a shallow Tupperware container, drizzling olive oil and vinegar over the raw vegetables. She showed him where she’d grouped it all together in the refrigerator.

“I’ve still got time to make you something for lunch.” She turned the radio off. “In case you change your mind.”

“You’d better not,” he said. “If I eat in the middle of the day I’ll need to lie down.” He hadn’t moved from the table.

“I’m not going to be home until late.” She was in the mudroom getting her jacket and workgloves and cap.

“You can stay all night if you like.”

“I might.”

“I think you should,” he said.

She came back, kissed him and looked around the kitchen, and when there was nothing left to do she kissed him again. He thought she smelled like wet coins, like stripped copper wiring mixed with something sweet, and wondered if she ate candy in bed. If it helped her sleep.

She stopped at the door. “You won’t forget to smoke your cigarette?”

“Not hardly,” he said.

He heard her on the porch and then the truck starting up in the workyard. Her kiss had tasted fruity from the lip balm she used, and now he had the whole day to himself. An old man with a single task he expected to accomplish before she returned, every part of which he’d rehearsed a dozen times in his imagination.

He washed his face and shaved, working his tongue over his bottom lip to see if he could still taste her, and he could.

Before it got any hotter he started up through the sage and the paintbrush and yarrow, turning back and forth on the ascending grades of the switchbacks, keeping to the trail his nearly forty years of diligence has worn into the hillside just opposite the house.

When he became short of breath he stopped until he regained it, and when a cloud passed before the sun he didn’t move at all, allowing the breeze to cool him thoroughly. He was in no hurry.

He simply meant to gain the top of the rise one deliberate step at a time, stabbing a shovel into the earth as a staff, with Griff’s high-school backpack slung over his shoulder and a long, iron tamping bar balanced atop that same shoulder, a bulging plastic garbage bag dangling like something an old hobo might invent. A pair of fluorescent dice hung from a carabiner clicked through a webbed loop on the side of the backpack, and underneath it the patch of a frowning yellow bee with the stitched caption Bee-otch.

It took the better part of an hour, but when he topped out under the big cottonwood he felt all right. Not great, but not worn down to the nub. It surprised him. He leaned the shovel and tamping bar against the tree and shrugged off the backpack, setting it by the garbage bag. He eased down onto the single cane chair that stood next to the trunk, tipping his hat off and hanging it on a knee so the wind could work at his hair. When his scalp prickled he dabbed at his head with a bandanna.

He’d watched the pastures and buildings that lay below him, the prairie stretching eastward toward the curved horizon, the comforting press of the Bighorns at his back, his whole life and didn’t need to see it all now to know what was there.

He shut his eyes and the memories of summer colors and the sense of expanse brightened in his mind. And as always there were the quick, familiar flashes from the lives of his wife and son and Mitch, and when he opened his eyes the sun caught on the black marble gravestones before him, flaring up like portals to a separate world.

A leaf brushed his cheek and he pulled the branch down to snap one lengthwise under his nose, enjoying the sweet, clean scent. Then he seated his hat and stood from the chair.

Just south of Ella’s marker he stepped off a six-by-three-foot plot, dragging the heel of his boot to describe its perimeter. Then he took up the tamping bar.

Two hours later he’d broken through the hardpan with the beveled end of the bar and shoveled out a foot of the dry, caked earth. After that he found more rocks, but the soil was looser, just like he knew it would be. He retrieved one of the old quart bottles he’d filled at the tap and packed in the knapsack and drank most of it. He thought if he had to take a leak, he’d piss in the hole and make the digging easier. Though his shirt was damp under his arms and across his back, he still felt fine, thinking he might get out and dig a hole once a week, that it would be a real improvement in his life. Then he wished he could see well enough to drive into town so the tourists could have a look at him. A couple of times in the past year a woman in city clothes had asked to take his picture, and he’d enjoyed the experience. It made him feel he hadn’t faded away altogether, that he was still somehow worthy of notice, even if only as a sort of rural oddity.