Bone Fire

Eleven

HE WAS UP on his knees in the truckseat, turned sideways, with the seatbelt slanting down under his arm and across his ribcage. “When the Boogeyman peeks in his closet,” he said, his voice chattering because the roadbed had deteriorated to a dry washboard, then he started giggling and couldn’t stop.

They jounced down through the cattleguard and he pivoted around facing forward, straining against the seatbelt like he’d fallen upon a guitar string, singing out, “Boing, boing, boing.”

“Goddamnit, Kenneth.”

“You don’t know, do you?” He was still giggling. “You don’t know what the Boogeyman was checking for?”

“Sit down like you should.”

McEban hunched forward over the steering wheel to let the air get at his back, and Kenneth sat down, crossing his arms over his chest. The dust they’d raised stood so thickly in the cab they appeared blurred to each other.

The boy announced: “You owe me a quarter for cussing.”

His feet didn’t quite reach the floormat and the dashboard was heaped up with catalogs and receipts, a single workglove, a pair of vise grips and an antenna cable McEban bought at the NAPA auto-parts in Sheridan, still shrink-wrapped because they decided they liked the radio better when it didn’t work, all of it coated with the reddish talc. The Sunday funnies from a Billings Gazette fluttered and snapped on the seat between them.

“The Boogeyman was checking to see if it was Chuck Norris who was in there.” His voice a shrill vibrato.

“I was going to say Chuck Norris.”

“I’ll bet you weren’t.” He pinched a quarter out of the coins in the ashtray, slipping it into his front pocket. “I can’t see where we’re going.”

“You know where we’re going. Look out the side window if you need something to see.”

“You were going to say Superman.”

“No, I wasn’t. If you’d have given me a minute I would’ve said Chuck Norris.”

Kenneth turned toward the window, opening his mouth, sticking his tongue out. The air tasted sweet, of red clover and sage, of the flowering cress that bordered the sloughs.

After breakfast McEban had perched him on a kitchen stool with a bath towel safety-pinned around his neck and given him a buzz cut. He’d used the Oster Turbo Clippers he’d bought at the Wal-Mart in Billings, and they were both anxious to see how it would turn out. Now the boy sat rubbing the bristle at the crown of his head.

“I like how it feels,” he said.

“I could freshen it every couple weeks if you want.”

“That’d be okay in the summer.” He still had his hands up, dabbing. “Could you make a pie out of clover?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Could somebody?”

“Maybe Chuck Norris could.”

The boy smiled, poking through the clutter on the dash until he found a pair of sunglasses. He wiped the lenses on his shirttail and put them on. “I don’t know why I can’t get up on my knees. You said if we ever got in a wreck the airbag would squish me no matter how I was sitting.”

“When did I say that?”

“When I was littler.”

“Well, you’re bigger now. You won’t squish if you’re sitting down like you are.”

Curtis Hanson was whipping weeds in the borrow ditch behind their row of mailboxes, his two stocky blue heelers jackknifing in the air at his sides, snapping at the flying weedstalks. Curtis waved and McEban waved back, turning onto the county road. It was hot enough that the macadam felt greasy under the tires and the truck slewed and caught.

“You know why Chuck Norris’s dogs pick up their own poop?”

“I think that’s probably something I knew last week.”

“I’ve told you this one before,” the boy said, staring right at him.

“You look like some kind of bug in those glasses.”

He lowered the glasses, narrowing his eyes, speaking each word distinctly: “Because Chuck Norris doesn’t take shit from anybody.”

“I think you better put that quarter back in the ashtray.”

They stopped in the alley behind the Ace Hardware and McEban backed around to the end of a rusted Quonset hut. The double doors were slid fully open on their tracks, below a faded sign reading JOEY’S WELDING. They dropped the tailgate, and Joey came out and shook McEban’s hand and then the boy’s and stood with them.

He wore a leather apron over a stained sweatshirt that was baggy in the elbows, the sleeves dotted with burn holes. They all stared at the broken sickle bar in the bed of the truck.

“You find the same rock you did last year?” Joey coughed productively and turned and spat against the side of the building.

“It was a different rock this time.”

“You think about buying new?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I would if you told me I had to. I’m not sure I can afford new.”

Joey nodded, leaning over the sidewall. His welding helmet, hinged back on his head, was skull-shaped and bright red with yellow flames painted on the sides to represent ears. He ran the pad of a thumb over a jagged end of the sickle bar. “I guess you won’t have to just yet.”

They carried in each half, going wide around the other men at work with their torches, and set the pieces up on an angle-iron-and-sheet-metal worktable. Kenneth stared up into the banks of fluorescent lights overhead, shading his eyes, searching the corrugated walls for a window. There weren’t any.

“I forgot how hot it gets in here.” McEban’s face was flushed, and he tipped his hat off and cocked an arm up, digging his forehead into the angle his elbow offered.

“It’s not as hot as working over a grill in Mississippi.” Joey peeled away the yellow customer copy from the work order and handed it to him. “I did that once, and it was hotter.”

They started back toward the truck.

“Or unloading boxcars, or running the press at a dry cleaners. Not everybody gets to work outdoors.”

They stopped on the cement apron in the sun.

“A bakery’s no fun in the summer, either.”

“How long do you figure?” McEban asked.

“How about Friday?”

“Morning?”

When Joey nodded, the welding mask came down, its dark lens flashing in the sunlight. He pushed it back up. “Late morning, to be on the safe side.”

Kenneth looked at McEban to see what he thought of the helmet, but if he was thinking anything at all it didn’t show. His mother always said, “McEban wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouth full of it.” If she was right, he thought, it worked in her favor.

They dropped off a pair of boots at Burke’s to have them resoled and -heeled, and stayed longer in the bank than was necessary, enjoying the central air. When they felt refreshed, they walked across Bighorn Avenue to the Carnegie Library and stood on the plastic runners that covered the carpet between the bookshelves to argue over their list, whispering about which books might provide the most enjoyment.

Kenneth liked the building’s musty odor, how the sunlight fell in through the high louvered windows, the general effort made for quietude and solemnity. When he was too young to have figured out how the world worked yet, he thought the place an actual annex of heaven. He believed, when he tilted a book down from the shelf, sat cross-legged in the aisle and held it open reverently against his thighs, that he was holding the soul of the man or woman who had written it. He wept when Mr. Simmler, the librarian, told him, “Young sir, your head is in a place where the sun will not shine.” He called all the boys in town “young sir” and the girls “young madam.”

They settled finally on Smoky, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Artemis Fowl. Kenneth carried the books up to the circulation desk and stood waiting for Mr. Simmler to finish his game of solitaire, raising up on his toes so he could see the cards. “You can play the red four on the black five,” he said.

Mr. Simmler tilted his head, studying the layout. “So I can.” He played the four over, but now his concentration was broken and he laid the deck aside. “What have you got there?”

Kenneth slid the books up on the counter, and Mr. Simmler took up The Adventures of Robin Hood. “All good choices, young sir.” He slipped the date-due cards from the pockets inside the front covers and stamped them. He was wearing a green visor and a bolo tie with four silver aces fanned at his throat, and when he looked over to where they racked the magazines, Kenneth looked too. McEban was leaned against the metal shelving and leafing through a Popular Mechanics. “Indeed,” Mr. Simmler said.

When they left the Carnegie it wasn’t late enough to drive home and fix supper, and still hot as the welding shop, so they parked where the Fourth Street Bridge used to be. Bikes were tilted over among the cottonwoods, and they could hear the screams of boys, a dog barking, the laughter of older children. McEban stepped out of the truck and Kenneth worked his swimming trunks out from behind the seat.

“Anybody watching?” he called, and when McEban shook his head he peeled down to his underwear and pulled the trunks on, kneeling on the seat to tie the cord at the waistband. “Mr. Simmler looks like he wishes he was dealing cards in a Western movie.”

McEban smiled from where he stood with a boot up on the front bumper. “As far as I know he’s never worked anywhere but the library.”

Kenneth jumped out, turning his left foot up to get at the bottle cap stuck to his heel. He pried it off and wound up like a big leaguer, pitching it into the trees.

They started slowly toward the creek, Kenneth being careful about the scatter of brown glass, stopping to watch an astonishingly pale fat boy climb to the top of the concrete abutment and launch himself, shrieking, out into the air over the creek. A heartbeat passed and the noise was abruptly choked off, and then a spray of water rose into the sunlight.

“Was that Clyde or Claude?” McEban asked.

“ Clyde.”

“How can you tell?”

“Claude’s fatter.”

Across the creek on the far abutment, two high-school girls in bikinis were lounging on towels with a tall boy standing between them drinking a bottle of beer. One girl was smoking, and all of them were watching a black Labrador swimming hard after a floating yellow tennis ball.

“I’m going to do it today,” Kenneth said.

“I thought you already had.”

“I could have, but I wanted to wait till you could see me.”

“I’m glad you did.”

They walked out across the backfill to the top of the broken concrete and looked down. Below them the water was green and deep and flat, and downstream the fat twins had wedged themselves among the rocks where the stream turned white and foamy, churning against their shoulders, and they called out again and again as though something unexpected and mildly obscene was happening. “I’m getting a massage. Oh my God, I’m getting the very best massage.”

“It looks farther down when you’re up here,” Kenneth said.

“Yeah, it does.”

“I think I better see how cold the water is first.”

“That’s what I’d do.”

The boy climbed down the side of the abutment, where the retaining wall had fallen away in ruin, the rusted rebar showing through, and waded out into the pool. He stood waist-deep, shivering, and McEban tried to imagine what had happened to the bridge and why he’d never wondered about it before. It was already gone when he was a boy, to fire or flood or poor design, and suddenly it occurred to him that he’d taken this, like most of his life, as a matter of course.

The black dog climbed out of the creek, sheeting water and lunging up the slope between the girls, bracing to shake mightily, and they screamed, turning away and throwing their hands up to shield their faces. All three of them were laughing, and the boy set his beer down and worked the ball out of the dog’s mouth, bounced it once and then threw it in a high arc upstream. The dog leapt without looking, and they all shaded their eyes against the glare to watch him hit the water, go under and come up as the ball smacked down at the head of the pool, everybody applauding and hooting, feeling lighthearted and forgetful of any lesser afternoon.

Kenneth climbed back up, hugging his sides, then sucking in a deep breath and nodding while McEban stood off to the side. He ran right past him, his face stiff in concentration, and out into the air, his legs still cycling as he dropped, and came up gasping, beating at the surface with both arms. Then he went slack, letting the current take him.

McEban climbed down to the water’s edge, pulled off his boots and socks, rolled up his pants and walked in up to his knees. The fat boys were jumping in holding hands when his cell phone rang, and he worked it out of his pocket and said hello.

Kenneth was at the top again, waiting for him to look, but McEban was wading downstream talking angrily into his phone, so he jumped again right away, howling so the other kids couldn’t eavesdrop. After he jumped a third and fourth time and got to the shore, McEban was sitting in the sand pulling his boots on over his dampened socks.

“We have to go,” he said.

“Now?”

“Right away.”

Someone threw the ball again and they heard the dog hit the water.

McEban stood up, stomping his feet harder into the boots. “You think this is something you’ll remember?”

“Sure,” Kenneth said. Then, “What?”

“Today.” McEban swept a hand toward the abutments. “All the times we’ve come down here. When you’re older you think this is something you’ll remember?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” the boy asked, but he felt scared. Like he hadn’t jumped. Like he’d chickened out and they both had agreed it was a feat he would never accomplish.

They’d been mostly quiet on the drive home. McEban said something about the weather, how he preferred the longer days of summer in spite of the heat, and he’d nodded in numbed agreement. His face felt heated, and something seemed to be fluttering behind his breastbone. The only thing that felt fine was his new haircut, beaded with creekwater, the breeze providing a welcome coolness. That was the best part of the trip.

But here they were home and he’d changed out of his wet swimming trunks, standing on the porch with his backpack leaned against his leg, waiting for McEban to be done talking with Rodney. He shifted his stance, adjusting the basketball against his hip. He’d thought about packing his baseball and glove, but didn’t know how a game of catch would go over in Laramie. He knew he could shoot baskets by himself. He watched the men at the pickup, thinking he might be getting sick, and then he was sure of it.

“I need to see you for a minute,” he called. His voice sounded frail and he cleared his throat.

They turned, staring at him, and he knew for a fact he was the last person he could think of to figure out that this friend of his mother’s was his real dad, and that McEban had always known it.

“I’m sorry,” he said when McEban stepped up beside him.

“For what? Did you set fire to something?” He was trying to make a joke, but it didn’t come out funny.

“I’m getting sick,” the boy told him.

“You were fine a while ago.”

“Now I feel like puking.”

They heard the pickup door open and watched Rodney pull the keys out of the ignition to make the dinging sound stop, then lean back into the shade of the cab.

“I don’t like it either, Kenneth, but this isn’t something we can get away from. He showed me the papers. He showed me where your mother signed.”

The boy looked at where she parked her trailer beside the house, the spot rutted from the tires, the bunchgrass broken and discolored. “You would’ve told me if you knew this was going to happen, right?”

McEban knelt down on a knee in front of him. “I guess maybe not,” he said. “I guess I always thought it might, I just didn’t know when. But I’ll bet this turns out to be fine.”

“Is that what you really think?”

“It’s only for three weeks. I think you can have a good time if you’ll let yourself.”

Kenneth bounced the ball once, then settled it on a porch chair. “I need you to look at something.”

“All right.”

“Inside, I mean.”

McEban followed him into the kitchen and he bent over at the counter, wedging his hands up against the edge like some rough cop had just ordered him to. When they heard the truckdoor slam, Kenneth laid his face against his arm and looked out the screen door. “I hurt my back.”

McEban stared down at his thin back, the T-shirt stained off-center on the right side near his waist. The blood was bright and fresh, dried only at the edges. “Well, Jesus Christ,” he said, carefully pinching the shirt up.

“Is it bad?” the boy asked.

“You sound like you wouldn’t mind if we had to go in to the doctor’s.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“It’s not that bad.”

Kenneth nodded, his cheek still pressed against his arm. “I didn’t think it was. I could sort of see it with the hand mirror in the bathroom.”

The skin was scraped away behind his right kidney, but it didn’t appear to go deeper. “I’ll bet this hurt like a son of a bitch when you did it.”

“I didn’t feel anything till I got out of the water. That’s two quarters you owe me.”

“I’m going to have to put something on it.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll find something that won’t sting too much.”

McEban went into the bathroom and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bag of cotton balls, a tube of antibiotic salve, a package of square gauze bandages and tape, all of it cradled up against his chest. When he dabbed at the wound with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball, the boy widened his stance and hung his head between his shoulders. McEban could hear him breathing through his mouth.

“That’s not too bad, is it?”

“It’s okay.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last time I jumped, I came down too close to the concrete. I was showing off.”

“How come you didn’t say anything?” He was peeling the packaging away from the gauze.

“I didn’t think it was a good time to say something.”

“And when did you think a good time would be?” McEban smoothed the tape around the edges of the bandage and pulled the T-shirt down. “Did you think it’d heal up on the drive home?”

They heard footfalls on the porch, the scrape of a chair being moved.

“I didn’t want you saying anything to my mom when you were on the phone. I didn’t want her to know.” He pointed his chin toward the porch, looking like he might finally cry. “Or him.”

“How’d you figure out who I was talking to?”

“It wasn’t that hard.”

McEban got a brown paper lunch sack from under the sink and put the gauze and antibiotic and tape in and folded the top back, and when Kenneth turned around he handed it to him. “I want you to put some salve on every day. And wash your hands first.”

“Okay.”

“If you don’t it’ll get worse.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I know you will.”

They were stalling, like nothing had changed and they were just standing around throwing out possibilities about what they might fix for dinner. They heard Rodney get up out of the chair. He passed in front of the screen door and they watched him walk back to the truck.

“My library books will be overdue before I come home.”

“I’ll take them back for you. If you want, you can check out the same books at the library in Laramie.”

“I don’t have a card for the Laramie library.”

“They’ll give you one.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll say something to him.”

The boy nodded. “What if I can’t think of anything to talk about? On the drive. What if he doesn’t say anything either?”

“Well, I bet his radio works.”

Kenneth was looking down at his feet. They both watched the tears fall at the toes of his boots. There weren’t many.

“You know why Chuck Norris doesn’t read books?” McEban asked.

The boy shook his head, still looking down.

“I can’t believe you don’t know this one.”

He pulled the bottom of his T-shirt up and wiped his eyes. “How come you do?”

“I looked it up on the computer the other day. When you were over at Bobby Martens’.”

McEban waited until he was done wiping his face, shaking his head like there was water in his ears. He waited for him to stand up straight and take a deep breath. “He doesn’t read them because he doesn’t have to. He just stares them down until he gets the information he wants.”

The boy’s eyes were still full but he smiled, like he was giving a gift, and they both knew that’s what it was.