Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

She walked across the room with her shoulders squared and her chin up. When she sat down she made sure her eyes were cold, and when Helen smiled she just stared.

A waitress appeared at her shoulder. “Would the lady like a cocktail?” She had an Eastern European accent.

“I sure would.” Jean leaned toward the girl’s nameplate-Ksenia-and wagged a finger toward Helen without turning to her. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

“It’s a gin and tonic.” Helen held the glass up as a woman might in an advertisement.

“ Bombay in mine.” Jean lounged back in the chair.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The girl backed away, bowing slightly at the waist, and Helen sipped her drink. She coughed, holding her napkin to her mouth.

“I don’t normally drink,” she said.

Her voice had been shaky on the phone when Jean called. Now it was just flat, but her body was sharp and shapely under the loose clothing. If she was nervous she’d made no effort to dress it down.

“I do,” Jean said. “Every chance I get.”

Helen nodded as Ksenia placed Jean’s drink before her and took out her order pad.

“We’re not ready yet,” Jean said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

They watched her backing toward the kitchen.

“They can’t get American kids to work,” Helen said.

Jean sipped her drink, then set the glass near the center of the table. Like shooting fish in a barrel, she thought.

“He’s got Lou Gehrig’s,” Helen said.

“Right.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“You’re full of shit.”

Helen’s lips were still moving, but the words had become slurred, the music on the sound system slowing. Jean sat back in her chair and finished her drink in two gulps. She laughed. “You’re telling me my husband’s dying?”

“Yes.”

“And he came to you?”

“I don’t think he meant to. But yes, he did.”

“Like an accident?”

“No. It wasn’t an accident.”

“And he couldn’t tell me?” Helen’s voice was coming clearer now, but Jean didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “Did he tell you why?”

“I don’t think they know why anyone gets ALS.”

“Why he couldn’t tell me.”

“He said he didn’t want to worry you.”

“Really?”

“Something like that.”

“He didn’t think fucking his ex-wife would worry me?” This wasn’t like shooting anything in a barrel.

“We never did make love. If that’s any consolation.”

“It’s not.”

Helen was folding her napkin into a triangle. “But we tried,” she said.

“Did you hold him?”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you weren’t making love. When you were trying to comfort him.”

“Yes.”

“Did he cry?”

Helen nodded.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” Jean was searching the room but there was no Ksenia. “This whole fucking conversation? It’s a Salvador Dalí painting. In the goddamn extreme.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“I wish he’d been fucking you,” Jean said.

Her hand was on the table in front of her, the fingers tapping. They both looked at the pearl ring flashing dully. Jean brought the hand into her lap.

“I would too,” Helen said. “If I were you.” She stood, bringing her purse up from the seat of the chair beside her. She slung the strap over her shoulder and walked straight out without looking back.

Ksenia asked, “Would the lady like another cocktail?”

Jean pushed against the arms of the chair to stand, and when she lost her balance the girl caught her under the elbow. She pulled her arm away. “I hope you’ll like this country,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Jean smoothed her hands over her hips, turning toward the archway. “The lady will have her next in the bar,” she said.

Now the music was louder, and she was tapping the rim of her margarita glass and Jamie was coming toward her behind the bar.

“There’s a fine piece,” she heard, and turned with her elbows hooked back against the edge of the bar. She wanted to feel like a fine piece.

“So tell me, boys,” she said, and when only the men at the nearest table turned she repeated it loud enough that they stopped playing pool at the end of the room, leaning against their cues. She brought the fresh margarita up for a sip. “So tell me, boys,” she said again, pausing, “who’d like to fuck the sheriff’s wife?”

They stared at her, then glanced at one another like kids at a dance, and she began to laugh and couldn’t stop, didn’t even try to.

CRANE FORCED the county SUV along a rutted mining track, stopping at the edge of a gully where the road had washed out. He stood staring down at the collapsed and rusted body of the culvert, at the shabby remains of the company buildings just a hundred yards beyond.

He crossed the creek on foot, working up the north-facing slope through the sage and juniper, skirting the house-sized erratics of weather-paled basalt, stopping to look across the valley to the mineshaft-sealed now, but not until one of the Manon kids had fallen through the rotted planking. He’d been with the search-and-rescue team that had gotten her out. The sheets of muscle in his diaphragm clenched and he lay down against the sidehill, panting, waiting for it to pass. He wondered if God had spoken directly to the girl, lost for hours in the damp tunneling below.

When he gained the skyline he stretched out on his belly in the sweep of shade thrown by a stand of chokecherries, the ranch house and outbuildings just five hundred yards below. He brought the binoculars up from around his neck.

There were half a dozen parked trucks and cars, men emerging from the barn two and three at a time to start up their rigs and drive out through the log archway. More cars arrived, everyone going into the big, weathered barn but coming out too quickly to have been of any help.

At dusk a column of bikers rode in. They gunned their engines, then let them idle down, and Brady came out of the barn and stood there talking to them until a man pulled a pistol and fired into the dry brush along the creek. It was just dark enough to see the flames snapping out of the barrel and the house cat breaking from the undergrowth in a desperate sprint, disappearing through an opening in the masonry of the springhouse. Everyone but Brady was rocking at the waist with laughter.

He walked past the man, reached into a slash pile at the border of the drive and wheeled around with a four-foot length of pine scrap, catching the man full in the face, dropping him, then walked back into the barn. The downed man rolled onto his side and from there to his feet, staggering.

Most of the light had gone out of the day, and Crane sat back waiting for the moon to rise. He remembered hunting this valley with his father and old Jake Croonquist when he and Brady were still too young to shoot, sent ahead like eager hounds, circling, flushing the birds back toward them.

A covey of chukars was moving off the hillside behind him now, maybe a couple dozen in all, the accumulation of their low, harsh speech like the whispered conversation of anxious children.

It was late when he got back to town and swung past the clinic, pulling in at the curb. Dan Westerman was sitting on the front stoop.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Crane said.

“I normally don’t.”

“You get a guy through here a little bit ago?”

“I just put thirty stitches in some simple son of a bitch’s head, if that’s what you mean.” He dropped the butt on the step before him. “I hate fucking motorcycles.”

“He going to be okay?”

“He’s going to be fine, but I hope he’s got a relative who’s a dentist. How are you feeling?”