Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

“You think you’d want this house?” he asked.

“Like to live in?”

“Yeah.”

“Where would you go?”

He put the ham back in the refrigerator. “I’m retiring.”

She was staring into the living room as if she’d never noticed it before. “I read somewhere,” she said, “that you shouldn’t make decisions after someone close to you dies. Not for a year. Not big ones, anyway.”

“I was thinking about it before she died.”

She switched feet.

“That would make who, Hank Kosky, the sheriff?”

“You never know who people might vote for.”

She straightened her legs and held her feet together, stretching her toes. “You’d really leave?”

“I’ve been here most of my life.”

She sat up straight in her chair, tucking her legs back along the sides. “I think you should keep it. You could rent it to somebody in case you changed your mind.”

He sat down again. “She said she thought about what it would be like if I died.” He tried his coffee and it had gone cold, so he carried the cup to the sink. “She said it like it wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen.”

“That was just Mom.” She lifted her purse from the table, opening it on her lap and stuffing her pantyhose in.

“Will you take some of this food with you?”

She stood up. “Not tonight.”

“It’ll just go bad.”

“I’ll get it tomorrow. I thought I’d come over and box up some things. Her clothes. Some other stuff.”

“That doesn’t have to happen right away.”

“It’ll make me feel like I’m doing something.”

She had her purse slung over her shoulder and her shoes in that hand when she hugged him.

He kept his body very still, willing the tremors out of the muscles in his arms. He thought the beer had probably helped. “I care about you,” he said.

She kissed him on the cheek. “Me too.” She stepped to the door. “I’m not sure what I’m doing either. I don’t think it’s all hit me yet.”

On Monday he talked with his attorney and had Griff made his sole beneficiary. He drew up a living will, called about his pension plan and Social Security, got his meager 401(k) switched over to her. He thought about looking at nursing homes in Billings, then decided he needed to be farther away. The next day he drove to Denver. He found a place in Englewood he thought he could afford. It was clean and the staff looked like they’d seen so many people die it wasn’t a shock anymore. That’s what he wanted. Efficiency with no tears.

He got drunk in a downtown bar that night and had a seizure in the taxi riding back to his motel, then tipped the cabbie more than he needed to.

On the drive home he stopped in Sheridan for dinner and was just finishing when Helen and Larry came in. They turned away, speaking with their heads drawn close together, and then Larry nodded and she took his hand and they walked straight to the table.

“I’m so sorry about Jean,” she said.

Larry shook his hand. “We should have come to the funeral.”

“She drew a big crowd anyway.”

They all nodded. There was laughter from a table by the windows.

“Will you join us?” She was staring down at what was left of his meal.

“I’d better get going.”

“For a drink, then.”

There were voices at the front of the restaurant. They turned and saw a young man in a wheelchair talking with the hostess, explaining something. Both his legs were gone, his jeans folded back at the knees, his haircut still high and tight. The girl pushing the chair stared down at him and didn’t look up.

“I wish Dick Cheney was here,” Helen said. “I wish he had to see a boy like that every day for the rest of his life.”

Larry shook his head. “Know that Jean’s in our prayers,” he said.

“Thank you.”

She hugged him. “I need you to believe how truly sorry I am,” she said.

He nodded. He kept his eyes open, breathing through his mouth so he wouldn’t smell her hair. She stepped away,

“Have a good vacation,” he said.

“Buenas noches,” Larry said.

She stood between them with her hands laced at her waist, her jaw clenched, and they both knew this was the stance she took in public when she thought she might cry.

IN THE EVENINGS, after eating his dinner at a café around the corner from the office, he’d drive out to the house and give her garden a couple of hours. Hoe the weeds, harvest whatever was ripe, turn the sprinklers on for a good soak. The first night after her death he’d carried a box of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and bell peppers over to the next-door neighbor’s, but they’d looked at him with such pity that he now brought the produce into the office, encouraging Starla and his deputies to pick through it. He learned there was far too much zucchini in the world and that he slept better on the cot in the cell. One night Pearl brought in a plate of cookies.

He thought he might buy a van and drive to Arizona. Have a look at the Grand Canyon, loop down into Mexico and poke around. But what if his condition worsened and he couldn’t make it back? That’s how it had gone with his grandfather. He’d been able to sit up at the table and mash his food around enough to swallow, then two weeks later was in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace to keep his head level and sucking his meals up through a straw. Anyway, he couldn’t imagine choking to death in a foreign country and didn’t want some stranger he couldn’t understand shoving a catheter in his dick.

He drove past the house before turning back south and out of town. The front door was propped open, Einar’s truck parked in the driveway with boxes in the back. Griff passed in front of the living-room window.

The traffic was light. Ranch families, tourists, a tractor idling along the shoulder, a carload of teenagers coming into town going ninety. He could see the expression of alarm on the driver’s face and watched in the rearview mirror as the kid stood on the brakes, locking them, damn near rolling it. He imagined their panic, their laughter, too young to honestly believe they’d been seconds away from dying, now pitching beer bottles two and three at a time into the borrow ditch, arguing who among them could walk the straightest line, contemplating how they’d get to school or get laid with no driver’s license, what story they’d fabricate for their parents.

His dad had taught school. He’d also taught him how to roll the gauze pads and wedge them around the outside of his grandfather’s bottom teeth, after plucking out the soaked rolls, the old man silently drooling. He remembered the apology in his eyes, unable by then to voice his thanks. Finally, the gauze wasn’t enough and they had to knot a bath towel around his neck.

His dad had done the heavy lifting. In and out of bed and the wheelchair, on and off the shitter. He’d rigged a canvas sling from the bathroom ceiling, like a suspended lawn chair, to get his father in under the shower. He’d strip down and get in with him, soaping, rinsing carefully. And then it was just sponge baths on the bed, the old man’s legs swollen red, purple and blue.

He turned off on Cabin Creek, stretching his mouth open wide, working his chin back and forth to relax the muscles in his jaw. He’d had another seizure last night, waking with it, biting at his tongue. He could still taste the blood in his mouth.

The tires rattled the plank bridge and he swung the cruiser around through the workyard, parking by the barn. There was only Brady’s truck and the rusted hulk of a ’52 DeSoto down on its rims, burdock and snakeweed growing out through the broken windows, the chrome hood ornament of Hernando’s head hack-sawed off.