Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

He knew the next question would be about which class was his favorite. “Science is my best subject,” he said, picturing Rodney in a classroom with a chalkboard behind.

“Are any of your teachers mean?”

“Mrs. Kazepa smiles a lot but she’s not ever happy.”

“It seems like there’s always one.”

“My mom teaches all over the place. In different towns, and in every one somebody likes her so much they ask her to stay with them. So she never has to get a room in a motel.” He thought about his mother’s brochures. “She’s real good at showing people how to live in their bodies.” It sounded important, worthwhile, when he said it out loud.

“I think your father told me something about that.” She drank from the slimy glass again, and he thought he might puke if she kept it up. “Does Mr. McEban just make desserts?”

“He makes everything.”

“Kurtie, look at me,” she said. “We aren’t going to have an accident today, are we?”

The little boy shook his head.

Kenneth opened the oven, stabbing at the brownies with a tooth pick, and they were almost done. He helped her gather the art supplies, stacking the tablets and crayons and colored markers in the pantry, then slipped on the oven mitts and set the pan up on the stove. He was trying to remember what McEban had said about his mother’s teaching when his brother dragged a chair to the stove.

“They’re too hot, honey,” Claire said. “We’ll all have some of Kenneth’s treat after our naps.”

Kurt climbed up onto the chair, staring down into the pan. “I only like the swirly ones.” His voice was choked with horror, his brows knitting, his eyes filled with tears. “These ones are just brown. I hate them. I hate the brown ones.”

He stomped his foot and she lifted him out of the chair, standing him on the floor by the table. She knelt in front of him, holding his head between her hands so he couldn’t look anyplace else. He was starting to sob.

“Boys who whine don’t get treats.” She spoke evenly, calmly. “They don’t get anything at all.”

He was sucking at the air like a fish wishing she’d drop him back in the water.

Kenneth finally remembered the exact phrase. “McEban thinks we fit in our bodies just fine.”

She looked at him, smiling, and then back at her son: “You get what you get, and you don’t have a fit. Do you understand?”

He nodded, tears dripping from his chin. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

After the kids had taken their naps and eaten a square of brownie, she led him into the laundry room and started explaining how to operate the washer and dryer, but when he said he knew about darks and whites and water temperature she let him do it himself.

And then there wasn’t anything else she could think of, so he went out in the driveway and shot baskets for an hour until she called him back in.

“I have a present for you,” she said.

She held out an iPod and he stared down at it in the palm of her hand, putting his hands in his pockets.

“Do you already have one?”

“They’re too expensive.”

She looked to the hallway where Kurt was pushing a red plastic truck against his sister’s leg. She told him to stop and turned back to Kenneth. “This one’s old, and whether you want it or not I’m going to get a new one.”

“Maybe Rodney would like it.”

“He has his own.”

The iPod didn’t look all that used. “What would you do with it if I didn’t take it?”

She smiled. “You, sir, are one seriously unfun little dude.”

“I just like to get things done.” He was thinking he had about as much fun as anybody else. “McEban said I couldn’t listen to one on the tractor, or when I’m riding a horse, because you can’t hear if something bad’s happening.”

“Well, we don’t have a tractor. Or horses, either. It’s yours or it gets trashed.”

He stared down at his feet, turning them so his toes were pointing straight. McEban had told him that if you learn to walk correctly when you’re a kid, your hips and everything else would last a lot longer.

“I guess,” he said, “if you’re going to throw it away.”

“I’m having an accident now.” Kurt stood in the hallway, his face full of surprise.

Rodney was tired when he got home but felt better after dinner, sprawling on the living-room floor and wrestling with the little kids, and Kenneth followed Claire up to his room and she turned the computer on.

“What kind of music do you like?” she asked.

“I don’t listen to music that much.”

“When you do.”

He thought about the music in band class, and on the radio, and that his mother played in her trailer when she was home. “Whatever you like would be fine,” he said.

He stood at her shoulder, watching her load songs on the iPod, and when she was done she showed him how to operate it. It was easy. He thought it would be. He knew really stupid kids who had one.

CRANE DROVE DOWN through Ranchester and across to Dayton, continuing west on Highway 14 up the long incline that rose in ascending plateaus through the native grass and sage foothills, finally parking the cruiser in a gravel turnout in a border of pine, the evergreens draping down over the rounded crest of the Bighorns like a throw of darker, greener fabric. He’d gained fifteen hundred feet off the prairie floor and could look back east thirty miles to Sheridan and the sweep of drier, flatter land beyond.

The traffic was light. Mostly out-of-state vans and motor homes easing down off the mountain in single-line convoys, the drivers unnerved by the steep grade, geared down and traveling twenty miles under the speed limit. Occasionally a local whistled past, raising a forefinger off the steering wheel to wave. He radioed Starla.

“I’m going to catch some lunch,” he told her. “Log me out for an hour.”

“Roger that,” she said. “BBFN.”

He could hear her unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It stands for bye-bye for now. It’s text-message shorthand.”

“We aren’t texting, we’re talking.”

“That doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t intermingle our disciplines. Are you going to run for sheriff again?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Seems to me you’re losing interest in law enforcement.”

He pulled a Ziploc bag from the glovebox and slipped the sandwich out. “Why don’t you run against me?”

“LOL.”

“Laughing out loud, right?”

“You truly are the hippest of bossmen, boss.”

“Just route any calls through to Hank.”

“Word that.”

He turned the volume down on the radio. A fence ran along the south edge of the turnout, and knotted in the top strand of wire were four pairs of panties, candy-striped, flowered, white and yellow, lifting and quivering in the wind. He finished his sandwich, checked for cell reception, and she answered on the second ring.

“It’s me,” he said. She’d told him when it was likely she’d be home and Larry wouldn’t.

“Hey.”

“You doing all right?”

“I’m just fine. What about you?”

“Better now,” he said.

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do the sweet stuff.”

“That’s your rule, not mine.”

“If I remember correctly you said you wanted a friend. We’ve both got someone to sleep with.”

“Have you told Larry we’re friends?”

He heard her let the dog out, walk back across what sounded like a tiled floor, pull a chair back, the last raising the hair on his arm. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Did you forget the number you dialed? I’m at home.”