Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

“A little sick to my stomach.”

It was after midnight when he got home and found her car parked up on the lawn and looked in through the windshield to see if she was asleep on the seat, but it was empty. He could still hear the throaty rumble of the Harleys gearing down into town. The corner streetlight was out, the Milky Way leaving a smear of light across the night sky above him.

He went inside. In the living room his clothes were heaped in the La-Z-Boy with his toilet kit on top. Their bedroom door was shut.

He found clean sheets and a blanket in the hall closet and made up the couch, waking early the next morning. A man stood framed in the kitchen doorway, staring at Crane’s pistol on the table at the foot of the couch. He was middle-aged, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, a light jacket folded over his arm.

They both looked over at the bedroom door at the same time.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Crane said. “It’s me she wants to hurt.”

Some of the tension went out of the man’s face, but he cut his eyes back at the pistol.

“This isn’t a movie,” Crane said. “You can go home now.”

He washed his face and under his arms at the kitchen sink and dressed and scooped the clothes and toiletries onto the couch, folding the corners of the blanket back across them, then slung the whole works over his shoulder.

Starla was at her desk when he came in to work.

“You run this back to the far cell for me?”

“You bet.” She didn’t ask why.

Two highway patrolmen, and his undersheriff, Hank Kosky, were waiting in his office.

“You boys get any sleep last night?”

They all nodded.

“Good.”

He walked back out to the wheeled cart by Starla’s desk and poured himself a cup of coffee, stirring in the artificial sweetener as he returned to the office.

The senior patrolman said, “Goddamnit, Crane, it’s not just baby-boomer accountants anymore. We’ve got some bad ones this year. Some Diablos and Angels on their way to Sturgis, I guess.”

Crane sat down behind his desk. “You need more help?”

“I wouldn’t mind it.”

“I’ll make a call.”

The state cops shook his hand, telling him they appreciated his cooperation, and then lingered outside to gossip with Starla.

Hank was still in his chair. “I hope you know this thing’s going to get somebody killed one of these years,” he said. “Or raped.”

“I agree with you, but it’s the mayor you need to talk to.” His back ached but the coffee was helping.

“I’m here to tell you I won’t work that Iron Horse Rodeo. It ain’t Christian.”

Crane stared at him until the older man looked away.

“It’s that weenie-bite event they run. Riding them women under that row of strung-up hotdogs and making ’em snap at them.”

Crane came around the end of the desk and Hank stood out of his chair. He was puffed up, ready for a fight, and Crane looped an arm across his shoulders and guided him through the doorway. He could feel Hank soften.

“They’re just hotdogs,” he said. “And I’m not sure Jesus keeps that close an eye on any of us.”

He drove to the top of the Bighorns, pulled into a campground and turned off the radio and slept in the backseat. He woke in the early evening, feeling more rested than he had in a week, and returned to the office. He cleaned up in the restroom while Starla warmed two Hot Pocket Ultimates in the microwave.

It was after ten when he double-parked at the corner of Ash and walked out into the milling crowd. There were two thousand Harleys backed into the curb for eight blocks along Main and two blocks back on Madison, Jefferson and Adams.

The volunteer fire department had lined hay bales through the crosswalks west of the main drag and the vendors had set up their tents and kiosks in the streets behind them. They hawked knives and cups of beer, leather clothing, Harley-Davidson patches sewn with silver thread. There were two tattoo artists and another offering hygienic piercings. A braut-and-soda stand. Burritos sold from a corner of the IGA parking lot, half the proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Club.

The Chamber of Commerce had mounted speakers and American flags on the corner lampposts and sixties and seventies rock and roll blared from noon until the bars closed.

He was standing across the street from the Spur when Brady came out. He watched him working the sidewalk like a politician, stopping to shake hands and clap shoulders.

Crane crossed at the intersection, following him east through a reeling street dance of curb-to-curb drunks and past the raised plywood stage where a band from Great Falls was butchering the chorus of CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”

Two blocks farther back, in the dirt and pigweed lot where Vorachek Saddlery had burned down, a gathering stood with their heads bowed before two sky-blue Dodge Power Wagons. The trucks were parked tailgate to tailgate, and in the bed of one a man paced back and forth wearing jeans and a leather vest, his beard grown to his waist. At certain points in his rant against Satan’s onslaught of alcohol, drugs and fornication, the beard lifted away stiffly, exposing his naked chest. Brady sat at the edge of the congregation on a cairn of blackened bricks. He was drinking a beer, and Crane squatted down next to him. They watched a young woman get helped up onto the bumper of the second truck and from there into the bed.

“Haven’t seen you in town in awhile,” Crane said.

“I haven’t been in awhile.”

The preacher stepped over the tailgates, the woman sinking to her knees in front of him. He spread his hand against her forehead and intoned, “‘We have been buried with Christ by baptism into death.’”

Brady sang, “‘It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son,’” then said, “I always liked that song.”

“But you been doing okay?”

“I’m doing great. You look like shit, though.” He took a pull from the beer.

The pickup bed was lined with plastic and filled with water that sloshed over the sidewalls and onto the dirt as the girl was lowered into it, the preacher cupping the back of her head and pinching her nose.

“That boy didn’t have to die like he did.”

Brady squinted through the weak glare of the streetlamp. “It wasn’t my first choice either.”

“Brought light and life to a formless world,” the preacher said.

“Cooking that shit wasn’t something he thought up on his own. He wasn’t even twenty yet.”

Brady swigged from his beer. “Hell, Crane, you don’t have to look so sad about it. I knew him a bunch better than you.”

The girl’s head came up, sputtering, and the preacher proclaimed, “And Jesus said unto Nicodemus: ‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water.’”

“We aren’t kids anymore,” Crane said.

“Amen,” the crowd declared.

“It’d be a hell of a lot better all around if you turned yourself in.”

“For you, maybe. I don’t believe it would be for me.”

“Do you repent of your sins, my child?”

The girl was shivering, her wet clothes clinging.

Crane stood.

Brady was looking up at him. “My guess is you didn’t bring an arrest warrant out with you tonight.”

“I wanted to talk first.”

“Now we have.” The light fell so completely from his eyes they appeared mere replacements a taxidermist might have chosen.

Crane unsnapped the leather strap over the hammer of his pistol as Brady stood up next to him, dropping the beer bottle. They heard it break.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” the preacher said.

“This isn’t just going away.”

“For the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” The preacher’s arms were spread wide.