Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

“I hate getting water in my ears,” he said.

He asked her to leave and Marin helped him into his bathrobe, then down the hallway with his walker. He was only limping.

That night he called for Griff, and when she came in he had the magnifying glass slung around and was holding a book open at his waist. She sat on the side of the bed.

“I’m getting stronger. I can feel that I am,” he said, and when she didn’t respond: “I just fell on my ass. I’ve done that my whole life.”

“You had a stroke.”

“I’ve probably been having them for a year.”

“What am I going to do with you?” Even to her the question sounded like a parent’s.

“Right there’s where I’m going with this,” he said. “I want you to get out and do something with your life.”

“Like what?”

“Whatever in the hell you want to do.” He’d raised his voice, trying to sound mad, but it had no effect. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“I’ve got plenty of time.” She slipped the book from his hands. “It doesn’t have to be this fall.”

“Nobody’s got plenty of time.” He nodded toward the door. “She needs to take care of me,” he said. “We both need it.”

She closed the book and left it on the nightstand.

The next afternoon thunderclouds rolled down off the mountains and the wind picked up and the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees. Four inches of pea-sized hail fell in half an hour and then it rained like a levee had broken in the heavens. An icy mixture filled the borrow ditches.

It cleared overnight and got hot again the next morning, and the nose flies and deerflies swarmed thickly as gnats. The horses bunched in the shade shaking their heads, their eyes swelling from the bites, rubbing their faces into one another’s shoulders. When they couldn’t stand it any longer they pawed at the air and ran.

A den of snakes had been flushed from a dry hillside on Nameit Creek, and the kids there carried hoes when they went out to do their chores, and the clinic called a hospital in Billings to ship down a reserve of antivenom just in case.

She saddled Royal and trailered him over to the corrals and loading chute on Deep Creek. Paul was waiting for her on a well-mannered dappled gelding he called Mister.

They rode the leases up on the mountain, where the cattle were still scattered and edgy, and in the late afternoon they found a heifer and her calf killed by lightning. Their bellies were torn open, and a gang of coyotes sat in ragged order against the skyline just thirty yards away, their muzzles and chests stained with fresh blood. Crowding the treeline was an assortment of raptors and ravens, a pair of golden eagles and a mob of lesser birds drawn to the excitement.

She rested a forearm against the saddlehorn, leaning over it to stare at the dead calf.

“It could’ve been a lot worse.” Paul took a notebook from his shirt pocket and recorded the numbers on their eartags.

“Not for them.” She reined her horse around, and he fell in beside her.

“I took a job with the County Health Department in Billings.”

She stopped the horse, the bird chatter almost making it hard to hear. “No more Africa?”

“You were right. It’s too far away.”

“And you’re bailing on graduate school too?”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

She looked back at the coyotes edging in to finish their meal, and snorted a laugh and spurred her horse forward.

“So we’re done talking about this?”

“I have things to do in my studio,” she said.

JEAN STEPPED OUT of the shower, drying off with a towel she’d brought in from the clothesline. It was stiff and knobby and brought the blood to the surface of her skin. She turned to the side, examining herself in the full-length mirror mounted on the inside of the bathroom door. She sucked her stomach flat. Her arms and shoulders and legs appeared unblemished, darkened from working in the garden. She smoothed lotion on, twice on her elbows, knees and heels.

She sat in her terry-cloth robe at the vanity in the bedroom, applying makeup, returning to the bathroom to wash it off, settling on just a hint of eyeliner and a pale lip gloss. She didn’t want the effort to show.

She drank iced tea and smoked four cigarettes on the sunporch waiting for her hair to dry, then went to the bedroom and shucked her robe off on the floor and brushed her hair until it shone, drawing it away from her face and securing it with a silver clasp. This was her best feature. Men stared at her hair even before moving their gaze to her breasts, her hips. Silver pendants in her ears. No necklace. She didn’t want to break the long, graceful lines of her neck.

She slipped into the powder-blue panties and bra she’d bought at Victoria’s Secret and stood in front of the mirror again, pushing her breasts up and together, drawing her hands away slowly. Her reflection was nodding.

She chose the jeans that made her ass look like she ran thirty miles a week, brown leather sandals with no heels, the beige silk-and-linen twinset that showed off her tan. She studied herself in the vanity mirror. This wasn’t man-pretty. That was something entirely different. This was down-to-business pretty. Then she took his grandmother’s pearl ring from her jewelry box and slipped it on, extending her hand to appreciate its simple beauty. She closed her hand into a fist.

She drove to the Hub with the windows up and the AC on low so she’d arrive fresh. There were a dozen cars and pickups in the lot, another dozen Harleys backed in against the concrete divider set in front of a hedgerow of caragana. She parked around the side of the log building and sat for a minute watching the tops of the cottonwoods to make sure the wind wasn’t up. The women’s bathroom wasn’t well lit and she didn’t want to have to fix her hair again.

She hadn’t had a drink all day. With her eyes closed she could imagine the first one, the warm flush spreading across her cheeks like a shawl over her shoulders. But not yet. Right now it was all about attitude, about having the edge.

She walked in through the side door and stood at the end of the bar, leaning into the padded bumper. She loved the odor of bars, especially in the summer. Damp, cool and yeasty, like a sip of beer.

The men sitting near her stared and looked away. She watched their reflections in the mirror set behind the rows of bottles, the bikers and cowboys and businessmen.

The bartender slid a coaster in front of her, tapping it with a forefinger. “It’s margarita night,” he said.

He wore black slacks and a white shirt with a pleated front, black garters snapped above the elbows to hold the sleeves back. It’s what passed for a uniform at the Hub.

“How’s it going, Jamie?”

“Same old same old.” He tilted his head back, his lips pursed like an old man’s, studying her. “I’m glad to say you aren’t looking your age.”

“You’re a sweetheart.” But he was too young, and spent too much time in the gym to be interesting. She pushed back from the bar. “I’ll order something with dinner,” she said.

“You want me to send Crane in when he shows?”

“Who?”

“Your husband,” he said. “If he comes in through the bar.”

“If he does, I’d buy a ticket to that event.”

She weaved through the tables, pausing in the archway to the dining room. Deep red carpeting, red draperies, flocked wallpaper crowded with pale watercolors, their prices printed on little white cards stuck to their frames. There was a banker and his wife from Sheridan she recognized, a real-estate agent working a client, a dozen families of tourists in their shorts and T-shirts advertising the places where they’d last vacationed. Helen sat at a table by the salad bar, both hands around a glass set on the red paper placemat in front of her. She wore a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and jeans. The scene held a strangely patriotic quality.