Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

They carried in each half, going wide around the other men at work with their torches, and set the pieces up on an angle-iron-and-sheet-metal worktable. Kenneth stared up into the banks of fluorescent lights overhead, shading his eyes, searching the corrugated walls for a window. There weren’t any.

“I forgot how hot it gets in here.” McEban’s face was flushed, and he tipped his hat off and cocked an arm up, digging his forehead into the angle his elbow offered.

“It’s not as hot as working over a grill in Mississippi.” Joey peeled away the yellow customer copy from the work order and handed it to him. “I did that once, and it was hotter.”

They started back toward the truck.

“Or unloading boxcars, or running the press at a dry cleaners. Not everybody gets to work outdoors.”

They stopped on the cement apron in the sun.

“A bakery’s no fun in the summer, either.”

“How long do you figure?” McEban asked.

“How about Friday?”

“Morning?”

When Joey nodded, the welding mask came down, its dark lens flashing in the sunlight. He pushed it back up. “Late morning, to be on the safe side.”

Kenneth looked at McEban to see what he thought of the helmet, but if he was thinking anything at all it didn’t show. His mother always said, “McEban wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouth full of it.” If she was right, he thought, it worked in her favor.

They dropped off a pair of boots at Burke’s to have them resoled and -heeled, and stayed longer in the bank than was necessary, enjoying the central air. When they felt refreshed, they walked across Bighorn Avenue to the Carnegie Library and stood on the plastic runners that covered the carpet between the bookshelves to argue over their list, whispering about which books might provide the most enjoyment.

Kenneth liked the building’s musty odor, how the sunlight fell in through the high louvered windows, the general effort made for quietude and solemnity. When he was too young to have figured out how the world worked yet, he thought the place an actual annex of heaven. He believed, when he tilted a book down from the shelf, sat cross-legged in the aisle and held it open reverently against his thighs, that he was holding the soul of the man or woman who had written it. He wept when Mr. Simmler, the librarian, told him, “Young sir, your head is in a place where the sun will not shine.” He called all the boys in town “young sir” and the girls “young madam.”

They settled finally on Smoky, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Artemis Fowl. Kenneth carried the books up to the circulation desk and stood waiting for Mr. Simmler to finish his game of solitaire, raising up on his toes so he could see the cards. “You can play the red four on the black five,” he said.

Mr. Simmler tilted his head, studying the layout. “So I can.” He played the four over, but now his concentration was broken and he laid the deck aside. “What have you got there?”

Kenneth slid the books up on the counter, and Mr. Simmler took up The Adventures of Robin Hood. “All good choices, young sir.” He slipped the date-due cards from the pockets inside the front covers and stamped them. He was wearing a green visor and a bolo tie with four silver aces fanned at his throat, and when he looked over to where they racked the magazines, Kenneth looked too. McEban was leaned against the metal shelving and leafing through a Popular Mechanics. “Indeed,” Mr. Simmler said.

When they left the Carnegie it wasn’t late enough to drive home and fix supper, and still hot as the welding shop, so they parked where the Fourth Street Bridge used to be. Bikes were tilted over among the cottonwoods, and they could hear the screams of boys, a dog barking, the laughter of older children. McEban stepped out of the truck and Kenneth worked his swimming trunks out from behind the seat.

“Anybody watching?” he called, and when McEban shook his head he peeled down to his underwear and pulled the trunks on, kneeling on the seat to tie the cord at the waistband. “Mr. Simmler looks like he wishes he was dealing cards in a Western movie.”

McEban smiled from where he stood with a boot up on the front bumper. “As far as I know he’s never worked anywhere but the library.”

Kenneth jumped out, turning his left foot up to get at the bottle cap stuck to his heel. He pried it off and wound up like a big leaguer, pitching it into the trees.

They started slowly toward the creek, Kenneth being careful about the scatter of brown glass, stopping to watch an astonishingly pale fat boy climb to the top of the concrete abutment and launch himself, shrieking, out into the air over the creek. A heartbeat passed and the noise was abruptly choked off, and then a spray of water rose into the sunlight.

“Was that Clyde or Claude?” McEban asked.

“ Clyde.”

“How can you tell?”

“Claude’s fatter.”

Across the creek on the far abutment, two high-school girls in bikinis were lounging on towels with a tall boy standing between them drinking a bottle of beer. One girl was smoking, and all of them were watching a black Labrador swimming hard after a floating yellow tennis ball.

“I’m going to do it today,” Kenneth said.

“I thought you already had.”

“I could have, but I wanted to wait till you could see me.”

“I’m glad you did.”

They walked out across the backfill to the top of the broken concrete and looked down. Below them the water was green and deep and flat, and downstream the fat twins had wedged themselves among the rocks where the stream turned white and foamy, churning against their shoulders, and they called out again and again as though something unexpected and mildly obscene was happening. “I’m getting a massage. Oh my God, I’m getting the very best massage.”

“It looks farther down when you’re up here,” Kenneth said.

“Yeah, it does.”

“I think I better see how cold the water is first.”

“That’s what I’d do.”

The boy climbed down the side of the abutment, where the retaining wall had fallen away in ruin, the rusted rebar showing through, and waded out into the pool. He stood waist-deep, shivering, and McEban tried to imagine what had happened to the bridge and why he’d never wondered about it before. It was already gone when he was a boy, to fire or flood or poor design, and suddenly it occurred to him that he’d taken this, like most of his life, as a matter of course.

The black dog climbed out of the creek, sheeting water and lunging up the slope between the girls, bracing to shake mightily, and they screamed, turning away and throwing their hands up to shield their faces. All three of them were laughing, and the boy set his beer down and worked the ball out of the dog’s mouth, bounced it once and then threw it in a high arc upstream. The dog leapt without looking, and they all shaded their eyes against the glare to watch him hit the water, go under and come up as the ball smacked down at the head of the pool, everybody applauding and hooting, feeling lighthearted and forgetful of any lesser afternoon.

Kenneth climbed back up, hugging his sides, then sucking in a deep breath and nodding while McEban stood off to the side. He ran right past him, his face stiff in concentration, and out into the air, his legs still cycling as he dropped, and came up gasping, beating at the surface with both arms. Then he went slack, letting the current take him.

McEban climbed down to the water’s edge, pulled off his boots and socks, rolled up his pants and walked in up to his knees. The fat boys were jumping in holding hands when his cell phone rang, and he worked it out of his pocket and said hello.

Kenneth was at the top again, waiting for him to look, but McEban was wading downstream talking angrily into his phone, so he jumped again right away, howling so the other kids couldn’t eavesdrop. After he jumped a third and fourth time and got to the shore, McEban was sitting in the sand pulling his boots on over his dampened socks.