Bone Fire

Twenty-five

A HIGH, mottled cloudshelf was keeping the day cool, and Marin found she enjoyed driving the big flatbed north on I-90, sitting up above the passenger cars, Einar napping on the seat beside her.

He woke as she ramped down into Billings and told her where to turn, and they drove up into the Heights. They were looking for an antique store he remembered, and when they couldn’t find it she pulled into a parking lot in front of a coffee shop. Einar craned around, looking out the windows.

“There should be a sign.” He was alarmed, disoriented. “A big sign with red letters.”

“I’m surprised,” she said, “but the drive wore me out completely.” She spoke calmly. She laid a hand on his thigh. “Can we go inside?”

He was staring at her hand, which seemed to anchor him. He nodded and followed her into the shop.

She ordered a cinnamon latte, got him to try a sip, and he ordered one too. They carried their coffees to a table by the front window.

“I know this is the spot.” He sat staring out at the truck.

“I’m sure it was.” She kept her voice soft and even, reaching across the table to pat his hand.

He pulled it away. “You’re not sure at all.” He held the hand like it had been stung. “You’re sitting there thinking your brother’s lost what little mind he has left.”

“That’s not true. Stores go out of business every day, Einar. When was the last time you were up here?”

“I was here with Ella.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake. How long ago was that?”

He took up his coffee cup in both hands, sipping. “I guess it could’ve changed owners.” He looked toward the young man running the espresso machine. “Maybe it was that boy’s father who sold antiques. Remind me to ask him if it was.”

“I’ll ask for their phone book,” she said. “We’ll find a good place, maybe even better than the store that used to be here.”

He had a froth mustache and she tapped her own lip, but he didn’t notice so she licked the corner of her napkin and leaned across the table to wipe his mouth. He let her.

“I’m sorry you lost her so young,” she said.

“You mean Ella?” He was calming down now.

“I had Alice almost my whole life.”

“I never understood how she could want a bald man.” He turned his hat up on the end of the table, scratching absently at his stiff gray hair, and when he saw her looking at his head he said, “Charlie Newland’s who I’m talking about. He and Ella sort of partnered up for awhile.”

“You don’t mean like bridge partners, or they went fishing together?”

“No. I mean the other.” He sipped his coffee. There was a line at the counter now. “This is a nice place,” he said.

“We’ll come again if you like. The coffee’s good.”

“I don’t really think I was ever what you’d call good help in bed, so she had it coming, I guess, and Charlie, he had that shriveled arm he got from having polio when he was a kid. Maybe he thought he had it coming too.”

She started giggling, and that got him started, and finally a young woman waiting in line came over to ask if everything was okay, and Marin told her it was far better than that.

They found a used-furniture store downtown, where she picked out a walnut dresser and matching armoire after checking her diagram of the cabin to make sure they’d fit.

The owner and the large, docile boy introduced as his nephew got the pieces loaded up against the truck’s cab with any surfaces that might rub padded with sheets of cardboard. Einar roped it all snug, the lines standing taut.

“I never could tie a knot worth spit,” the owner said, standing back with his hands on his hips, still short of breath from loading the furniture.

“If you live around horses,” Einar said, clearly pleased, “it’s not something worth bragging about.”

The man slipped a business card from his wallet, holding it out to Marin. “You folks drive careful, now,” he said.

When they got in the truck she asked if he was hungry yet, and he said, “Fuddruckers.”

“That sounds like a strip joint.”

“Well, it’s not, unless it’s moved. Griff and I ate there last fall when we were up here delivering a bull to a man from Molt. They’ll let you build a hamburger sandwich any way you want.”

“Do they have salads?”

“They have lettuce and tomatoes and onions, I know that much. And they sell beer. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a cold beer.”

She was pulling into the street. “I’m disappointed it’s not a strip joint,” she said.

After she’d had her salad, watching him drink a beer and eat a burger as large as her hand, she checked a phone book again. They drove to a store on King Avenue, where they lay down, one after the other, on half a dozen mattresses before she found one that suited her.

“We ought to get you a comfy chair while we’re here,” he said. “Something you might sit in in the evenings.”

He turned to find a clerk and felt the carpeting fall away, and a sudden panic rose, crowding the air out of him. He lurched to the side with his arms waving, thinking, Oh, my God, not now, we were having such a good day. There was a sharp and spreading pain behind his left eye.

He felt someone grip his elbow, and when he turned around an old woman was standing at his side, mouthing something in a language impossible to understand, some guttural phrase that sounded like a small dog barking, and he wondered if she was from a race of people who breed with beasts. “Where am I?” he screamed, watching her eyes fill with tears.

“Einar,” she called, her mouth moving slowly, but at least she knew his name and she smelled familiar, like something from home. Unlike everything else in the store.

Then he was standing behind the foreign woman, the two of them watching the man she had by the arm stagger and fall, a standing lamp going over with him. All of it was as slow and silent as some movie with the volume turned down, but he felt unbounded and terrifically happy, and then he was on his side, the fluorescent lighting burning his eyes, every sound a knifepoint. He struggled to his knees and, with the woman’s help, to his feet again. He could hear his teeth grinding, and he stepped away from her, one foot at a time, feeling for the edge of the world where it dropped off into darkness, the thin crust crumbling beneath him.

Since there were no windows in the room, he couldn’t determine whether it was night or day. A tube was taped to the back of his hand, his arms and chest bare. His sister was asleep in a chair by the side of the bed. He tried to reach out to her, but there was an unexpected heaviness in his arm. His head throbbed, and he thought he must’ve fallen. The whole building hummed. He could feel it in his shoulders and back, in the back of his legs. He pushed up in bed, and when Marin opened her eyes and saw him, she stood out of the chair.

“I want to go home,” he said. The words sounded like a slurred, off-key lullaby.

But she bent down over him, holding her cheek against his, her hand cradling his head. “I know you do, sweetheart,” she said.