Dog Run Moon

RUNOFF

It was June 21, the longest day of the year, and the snow on Beartooth pass was still eight feet high on either side of the road. Dale drove Jeannette and her two boys up there. It was seventy degrees when they left town, at least twenty degrees cooler when they got to the top. They glissaded down the soft edges of the glacier and had a snowball fight. The sun at that altitude was close and they all got a little burned. Later that evening, back at her house, Dale grilled hamburgers, and they ate on the porch. The creek that normally trickled through her backyard was on the rise, noisy, the color of watery chocolate milk.

After dinner Jeannette rubbed aloe on the boys’ red cheeks and put them, complaining, to bed. “Its not even dark yet,” he heard the oldest one say. “I can’t go to sleep when it’s light.”

“You’ve had a big day,” Jeannette said. “You just don’t know you’re tired yet.”

She came back out on the porch with a beer for him and a glass of wine for herself. She had the bottle of aloe too and she sat on his lap. She rubbed in the lotion, working it into the skin on his neck, his ear lobes, his cheekbones. Jeannette had small hands, strong fingers, blunt nails. Before she’d met her husband she’d been a massage therapist. She told Dale that when they got married her husband hadn’t quite demanded that she stop working. “He was always good at that, making demands seem like something less. I was a good massage therapist. And I enjoyed it. He said it was too sensual. He didn’t like me doing that with other men.”

“Too sensual?” Dale said.

“It wasn’t like I was giving happy endings. I’m thinking about getting back into it. It’s been ten years but I’ve still got my table and everything. I could use the money.”

“I volunteer to be your practice dummy. Maybe you could reconsider that happy ending policy.”

She laughed and swatted at him.

The aloe was tingling on his cheeks. Jeannette had her head back on his shoulder. He could feel her heat through the thin material of her sundress. She was a small woman. Small breasts, small waist, delicate feet, good thick heavy dark hair. She had an aversion to undergarments that he found attractive. This year she’d lost her father to cancer, turned forty-three, and watched as her husband was led away in handcuffs.

She sat on Dale’s lap, wriggling a little, as if she was just trying to get comfortable. She sighed. “What a great day,” she said. “That was the best day I can remember having in quite some time. The boys had fun. They really like you. They tell me that, I’m not just assuming.”

“I always kind of wished I had younger brothers,” Dale said, realizing immediately that it was probably not the right thing. Jeannette gave a soft laugh and sipped her wine. “How old would your mother have been?” she said.

“Much older than you.”

“How much?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful.”

“I guess I’m not quite a hag yet.”

Dale had recently turned twenty-five. He hadn’t managed to finish college. He was almost done with his EMT certification but for the past few months he’d been living in his father’s basement. He considered meeting Jeannette to be the single best stroke of luck that had ever befallen him. Before Jeannette, he’d been dating a girl for almost a year. A bank teller. She called him every day for a week before she gave up.

Occasionally, he thought about Jeannette’s husband, but only occasionally. The last thing she had told Dale about him was that he was in a halfway house in Billings. The boys wanted to see him but she hadn’t decided yet. She thought maybe it was too soon. For the most part she didn’t talk about him, and Dale didn’t ask.

They sat on the porch in the slow solstice twilight. The lilacs had opened and the air was musky with them. Dale was rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, listening to the sound of the creek, hearing in its dull murmur something like a gathering crowd, just beginning to voice its displeasure.

—

Dale ran in the mornings. It was a habit he’d picked up recently, part of some more general desire to straighten himself out. He’d tried meditating. That had never really worked. Running, though, was good. He laced up his shoes in the dark of his childhood bedroom, took the stairs two at a time, and did a five-mile loop. Across the tracks that bisected town, the gravel of the railway crunching under his shoes, down the hill to the river.

His dad would have considered all of it — meditation, breathing exercises, even running — nothing but hippie bullshit. Dale would have agreed, not too long ago. But then he went on his first ride-along with the Park County EMT crew and he’d seen a girl, a few years younger than himself, bleed out on the side of the highway while her drunk boyfriend got handcuffed and pushed into the police car. The boyfriend’s pickup was upside down in the barrow pit, the headlights still on, shooting off into the trees at a crazy angle. The girl was coughing, blood coming up. She’d been thrown from the truck and impaled on a jagged limb of a fallen pine tree.

He asked the other EMTs how they did it, coped with the constant trauma. Margie suggested meditating. That hadn’t worked. Tim said that he ran every day, no matter what. Dale tried this, and was surprised that it seemed to settle him in some way. Everyone said you became numb to it, or if not numb then just more able to break it down into a series of responses you needed to make to perform your job. Every situation, no matter how horrific, had a starting point, a place you could insert yourself to go to work.

He had to do something. He knew that. He’d floundered for three years at the university in Missoula, changed majors four times, finally just decided to not return for what should have been his senior year.

He’d been in the bar, drinking with some friends, half-watching a football game, when an old guy a few stools down keeled over and hit the floor, his back in a reverse arc, the cords of his neck straining, lips going blue. Dale stood up, looking around. Someone had his phone out, making the call. A guy that had been sitting at a table with a woman — maybe they were on a date, they were both kind of dressed up — came hustling over. He got down next to the old man, turned him on his side. He’d taken his jacket off and rolled it up under the old man’s head. He was holding his arm, saying things to him that Dale couldn’t hear. Aaron Edgerly, one of Dale’s friends, walked over, started saying something about jamming his wallet in the old guy’s mouth so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, but the man waved him off.

“Just stand back,” he said. “If you want to do something, clear these barstools away. They’re going to need to get in here with a stretcher.”

Aaron grumbled a little. But he put his wallet away, started moving stools. There was something in the man’s voice, ex-military probably. He was calm when everyone else was freaked out. Eventually the ambulance showed up. The paramedics carted the old guy off and the man went back to his date and Dale had spent the whole night thinking about how it would feel to be the guy who knew what to do in a situation like that, the one who people listened to when things got heavy.

Dale signed up for the EMT course the next day. He hadn’t told his dad. He wanted to wait until he had something, a certificate or diploma or whatever you got when you passed the exam.

Not long after he’d quit school and moved back home he’d overheard his dad talking to his uncle Jerry. They were sitting out on the porch listening to a baseball game on the radio. The kitchen window was open, and Dale was pouring himself a glass of milk.

“He’s a good kid,” his dad was saying.

“He is,” Jerry said. “A great kid, always was.”

“He’s just kind of a beta dog. You don’t like to say that about your only son but it’s true. He’s willing to be led, is what I’m saying. I love him to death.”

“Of course you do.”

“There’s alphas and betas. It’s how it has to be, but you just want the most for your kid. You know?”

“He’s young. I bet he gets it together.”

“I’d started my own business by the time I was his age. Bought a house.”

“Everyone’s different, man. He’s a good kid.”

“I know. That’s what everyone says.”

Dale went back down to his room at this point.

—

Though Dale’s first ride-along was forever burned into his memory — months later and the sight of the girl run through with a pine stob was still freshly horrible — his second was oddly pleasant, fortuitous even. It was a quiet evening in town, they’d only had a couple calls. One older guy who thought he might be having a heart attack but was just suffering from indigestion. A minor fender bender, a passenger complaining of whiplash. And then, a call from a residential neighborhood not too far from Dale’s father’s house, a child with a possibly broken arm. They got to the scene, and there were bikes on the sidewalk. A boy of about ten writhing on the grass, a woman kneeling next to him, trying to keep him still, smoothing his hair. Dale helped the EMT on duty check the boy over and apply a splint. He stole glances at the mother, cutoff shorts and a tank top, hands dirty like she’d been working in the garden.

In the ambulance the boy’s wailing slowed, and the woman caught Dale looking at her. She smiled.

Later that week he went for a walk and passed her house. She was out in the front yard carting a wheelbarrow load of mulch to spread under the rhododendrons that lined her driveway. The boys were playing basketball, the one in the cast making awkward one-handed shots. Dale was just going to walk by, but then she saw him and waved him over.

He played a game of H-O-R-S-E with the boys and then he fell out and sat there on the lawn with her, watching them play until it started to get dark.

“Well, I’ve got to get these hooligans to bed,” she said, nodding to the boys. “But, if you’re not in a huge hurry, you could finish spreading this mulch for me. I could probably dig up a beer for you.” She laughed as if she were mostly joking but Dale — who had very little experience with these things — could tell fairly easily that this was a woman at some sort of departure point in her life.

Dale stayed. He spread the mulch. It was pitch-dark when she had returned. He was sitting on the front step, and she sat close enough to him that their legs touched. She had beers for each of them and she told him that she was very impressed with people that devoted their lives to helping others in their most dire time of need.

“I agree,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. Very rewarding, though. Or, at least I think it will be.” He was going to say something else but she had her hand on his leg now.

“You could stay,” she said. “Here, tonight, I mean, with me. If you don’t have anything else to do.” She was talking fast now, like now that she’d started, her words were gaining momentum, coming downhill out of control. “I’m not going to sleep with you, I mean, I want to sleep with you but that’s it. I mean, I want to do more than sleep with you but tonight I just want to sleep with you. Maybe this is weird. I don’t know. Never mind.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Really? I’m forty-three years old and I’m still married, technically.”

Dale shrugged. “I just dropped out of college, and live in my dad’s basement.”

Jeannette laughed like this was the funniest thing ever. “God, that sounds perfect,” she said. “If we could all be so lucky. You want to take a shower?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, again? You’re pretty agreeable aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“My husband, ex-husband, whatever, once called me a bossy bitch.”

“You seem nice to me.”

She stood, reaching to pull him up too. “My shower’s not real big,” she said. “But, I bet we can both still fit. It might just be a little tight.” She said this last bit right in his ear. Dale figured that sometimes when a woman wants you to sleep with her but not sleep with her she actually means it. This turned out to not be one of those cases.

Later, in bed, her hair still wet, she pulled his arms around her and sighed. “This is what I wanted most,” she said. “I wanted all that other stuff we just did too, but this is it. I miss this so bad sometimes.” Eventually her breathing slowed and Dale thought she was asleep but then she gave a little kick as if startled. “Shit,” she said. “You’ve got to leave in the morning before the boys get up. It would just confuse them.”

I’m kind of confused myself, Dale thought.

—

Five years ago, her husband had been in a motorcycle accident. He’d been left with horrible back pain and had developed an addiction to OxyContin. He was unable to work. He got caught with three different prescriptions from three different doctors. That had scared him straight for a while.

“I thought he was better,” Jeannette said. “It was a hard thing. I never blamed him. I still don’t, really. He was trying. He still seemed out of it, though, like he was when he was on the pills, but he swore he wasn’t taking them anymore and I believed him. I had gotten another job at this point. I was still working days at the nursery and then nights at the Bistro when my mom could watch the boys. Anyway, I’m not complaining, but that’s why I did it. I was fed up. I was tired all the time and I just snapped.”

“What do you mean?” Jeannette had made him dinner. They were doing the dishes when she was telling him this. Standing side by side at the sink, Dale scrubbing a pan, Jeannette drying plates.

“I had him arrested,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. I came back from my second job and the boys were home from their grandmother’s, watching TV, and I looked all over for him and I eventually found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. He was — it was—heroin.” She said the word so quietly he could barely hear it over the running water. “He played baseball in college. He was a regional sales rep for outdoor gear. I still can’t really believe it. I called the cops on him. He tried to drive off and they got him before he’d made it five blocks. He did a year in Deer Lodge. He’s in a halfway house in Billings now.” With this, Jeannette finished drying the last plate. She snapped him on the rear with her towel. “Enough of that sob story.”

That night she didn’t tell him that he needed to leave, and the next morning she made him breakfast, the boys looking at him, solemn eyed, across the table.

“Our dad can throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball,” the one with the cast said. “How fast can you throw it?”

“Football was always more my sport,” Dale said.

The boy eyed him skeptically. “How tall are you?”

“Five-ten.”

“Where did you play?”

“Right here at Park High.”

“I meant after that.”

“That was it. There was no after that.”

The boy nodded as if this had confirmed some more general suspicion he’d been harboring. “My dad played in college.”

“Okay,” Jeannette said. “Boys, go brush your teeth. Dale, would you like more coffee?”

—

Dale had never been good at taking tests. He could know the material front to back, inside and out, but as soon as he was confronted with that sheet of empty, lettered bubbles — the knowledge that the whole enterprise was timed, the feeling of all the other test-takers silently massed around him, the smell of the freshly sharpened number-two pencils — his eyes would blur over, he’d second-guess himself, he’d sweat through his shirt. The EMT exam was a brutal gauntlet of 120 questions laced with words like: hypovolemia, necrosis, eschar, maceration, and diabetic ketoacidosis.

After running every morning, Dale sat at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice and took practice tests. He put his watch on the table so he could time himself. Sometimes his dad would interrupt him, coming in to get some water, or making toast, or firing up the lawnmower right under the window, but Dale didn’t mind. He could have done his studying in his room, but he liked to do it out in the kitchen where his dad might see. So far, his dad hadn’t asked him what he was up to, but Dale knew he was curious. He’d caught him drinking his morning coffee, thumbing through one of the study manuals, his eyebrows raised.

Dale was taking a practice test, in the middle of trying to decipher a particularly dense question, when Jeannette called. He let it ring. He was fairly certain that the correct answer was C. But, it was one of those questions where there could be multiple right answers, just one was more right than the others. He was pretty sure it was C, but it might have been A as well. These things confused him. He knew it was C. But then it might be A as well in which case it would be D because answer D was both C and A. Fuck. After a moment’s silence, his phone was ringing again. He answered this time and her voice was panicky.

“The creek,” she was saying. “It’s overflowing and it’s going to come in the house and I don’t even know if I have flood insurance and everything is going to be ruined and then mold sets in and maybe the foundation is already getting undermined and then when that happens you might as well just bulldoze the house. And—”

“Okay,” Dale said. “Hang on. Don’t worry about all that. No bulldozing. I’m coming over.”

When Dale got there, Jeannette was standing on the back porch, her hands wrestling themselves. The boys were on the couch watching a movie, and she shut the door so they couldn’t hear.

“I put a stick in the ground to mark where it was last night. That was completely dry yesterday. Now look. It’s come up a foot.”

The creek was huge, out of its banks, sluicing through the willows. The low spot in the yard where Jeannette had her rhubarb was completely underwater. There was a small rise and then the ground sloped back to the house. From what Dale could tell, if the water was to come up another foot it would top the rise and come pouring down the back side; there’d be no way to keep it out of the house at that point.

“Shit,” Dale said. “Okay. Well.” She was looking at him. Waiting for something. Dale imagined he could see it in her face, her want of husband writ large. He didn’t know what to do. “All right,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

He went down to the creek, slogged over the saturated ground, cold water rising above his boot tops. He could feel the trembling in the soil, the bushes rollicking in the flow, their roots trying to maintain their hold. A basketball came bobbing down the flat, turgid center of the creek — obscenely orange against the gray current — it caught for a moment against a branch, and then was gone. The creek that normally meandered sleepily through the backyards on this side of town had come awake, answering the call of the main river, bringing with it for tithe anything it could catch up.

“Don’t get too close,” she said, shouting so he could hear over the roar of water. “It’s dangerous.”

He slogged around some more, looking at the small rise that was the last defense against the rising creek, the stick she had pounded into the ground, trying to calculate how much time they had. It didn’t look good. He went back to stand next to her on the porch. He tried to put his arm around her, but she was too nervous. Pacing up and back on the porch.

“Shit, shit, shit. What else?” she said. “What in god’s name can be next?”

Dale didn’t know what to do. He called his dad.

—

Dale hadn’t told his father about Jeannette. But the town was small, and it hadn’t taken him long to find out. He’d been driving through the park, and spotted them sitting on a blanket, the boys playing in a sandbox, Dale’s head in Jeannette’s lap.

That night Dale’s father had insisted on making dinner. “I’m going to grill some elk steaks,” he said. “You make a little salad or something. We haven’t sat down together in a while.”

Dale was at the kitchen table reading about how to spot the signs of diabetic ketoacidosis. He looked at his father warily. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? We always run off and do our own thing. I haven’t seen you in a week. You too busy to eat a steak with your old man?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Okay, then.” He went out to get the grill going, and Dale washed some lettuce. They ate on the porch, the elk meat leaking red onto their paper plates, the salad mostly untouched, as if it were existing for memorial’s sake, a small gesture of remembrance for the woman who had been gone from their lives for a long time now.

His father had finished eating, his feet kicked up on the porch railing. He took a drink of his beer and belched. “I saw you got a girlfriend now, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Saw you in the park. Now, that was a domestic scene. Got yourself a little ready-made family going there.”

“It’s not like that.”

“I recognize that one. That whole thing was in the paper. He used to be a T-ball coach. A drug addict T-ball coach. Hard to imagine. He was embezzling too.”

“He doesn’t really factor into our equation.”

Dale’s father laughed. “Oh, son. Wetting the wick is one thing. Picnics with the kiddies is a whole different story.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Who said I’m worrying? Trying to impart some advice upon you is all. Pretty soon, you’re going to have fucked the interesting out of her and then you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

“Save it.”

“I’ll not. You live in my house and you’ll hear me out. All I’m saying is this — women are already a little bit ahead of men, age-wise. So, you start taking up with one who’s got a few years on you, and you’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage. She’s got a head start on you and there’s no way you’re going to catch up, she’ll be lapping you before long and you won’t even know it. There’s damage there. Trust me. When a baby comes out, part of her rational mind comes out with it, caught up in that stuff they throw away.”

“Jesus, Dad.” Dale carried their plates into the kitchen and then retreated to his room. Like his father had some great wealth of knowledge from which to draw his theories about women. As far as Dale knew, there had only been his mother, and god knows that hadn’t worked out too well.

—

Dale went around to the front of the house to make the call where the sound of the rising water wasn’t so loud. When his father picked up the phone Dale could hear voices in the background, phlegmy laughter.

Once a week Dale’s father and a number of his cronies met at the Albertsons for fifty-cent coffee and day-old donuts. It was an hour-long bullshit session. Topics veered, but usually returned and settled comfortably on: the current administration’s latest outrage against common sense, the weather, the elk herd numbers in relation to the burgeoning wolf population, what was hatching on the river, and why it was that the trout were all smaller than they used to be.

Dale filled him in on the situation, and in a few moments he was at the house in his pickup, donut crumbs in his beard. Jeannette was in the driveway, a worried half-smile on her face. Dale’s father brushed off Dale’s attempt at introductions.

“Forget all that,” he said. “No time to spare here. Fairgrounds. They got the Boy Scouts down there filling sandbags. Let’s go.”

At the fairgrounds, the Boy Scouts had a small mountain of sandbags. They were working in pairs, one boy fitting an empty bag over an orange traffic cone with the end cut off, the other boy shoveling sand in the funnel. Trucks were coming in and out, people tossing bags, classic rock turned up loud. It was Dale’s father’s type of scene. He immediately recruited a couple of loitering Boy Scouts and they hoisted the bags up to the truck bed where Dale stacked them. Dale’s father was circulating, shouting good-natured insults and encouragement. He’d found a Styrofoam cup of coffee somewhere and Dale heard him talking to the Scout leader. “Nah,” he was saying, “our house is on a hill. It would have to get biblical for it to touch us. This is for Dale’s little girlfriend. She’s about to get washed away.”

—

They stacked sandbags all afternoon. Dale and his father standing up to their knees in the icy water, Jeannette right there with them, ducking down to balance bags on her shoulder, walking from truck to stack to truck, a slight woman, but surprisingly capable of bearing weight. She dropped a bag with a grunt and went back for another. Dale watched his father watching her. He was a man who valued work above all else. He’d told Dale a long time ago that he wanted the inscription on his gravestone to read: HE GOT HIS WORK DONE.

The three of them stacked feverishly until their wall was built, a three-foot high barrier spanning the low spot in Jeannette’s lawn. When Dale looked up he could see the boys inside, their faces pressed to the sliding glass doors. His dad occasionally made an exaggerated scowl at them, and they ran back into the kitchen.

It took them two loads of sandbags until they had something that seemed capable of holding back the water. The rain had slackened, and they sat on the back porch, exhausted. Jeannette had gotten them beers and they drank watching the water rush by, still rising.

Eventually Jeannette stood and gathered their empties. “I want you both to go home and get cleaned up,” she said. “And then I want you both to come right back over for dinner. I’ve got lasagna that I made last week and froze. I can heat it up and make a salad and some garlic bread.” Dale’s father was starting to say something to protest but she held up her hand to cut him off. “I insist,” she said. “Dinner in forty-five minutes. Hit the showers. I make a damn good lasagna.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

—

After dinner, Dale’s father thanked Jeannette, and she hugged him, kissed his cheek, his face going red. Dale walked him out to the porch.

“I guess you’ll not be needing a ride home?”

Dale shook his head. “Guess not.”

“Can’t say that I blame you there.”

“Yep.”

“That was good lasagna.”

“Not bad.”

“Well.” He was looking down, scratching at his beard. He cleared his throat and spit. “Good work, son.” He stomped down the steps and Dale could hear him belching as he swung into the cab of his truck.

Dale went back inside and helped Jeannette with the dishes. They went to the porch with a blanket wrapped around them, listening, trying to gauge the depth of the water in the dim broadcast of the moon, not talking much. Eventually she fell asleep with her head on his chest, her arms and legs twitching occasionally.

Dale woke, sun just peeking up over the lilac bushes in the backyard. One of the boys was crying, he could hear it coming through the upstairs window. Jeannette was still sleeping, curled, knees to chest with her back to him. He waited for a moment for her to wake up, but the boy continued to wail, and she showed no sign of movement. He nudged her and she groaned and rolled over, her face still under the blanket.

“One of the boys is up,” he said.

She said something, mostly unintelligible, that might have been, “It’s your turn.”

Dale lay there listening to the boy wail for a few more moments. He slipped from under the blanket and squelched across the soggy, cold lawn in his bare feet. There was a brown scum line on the sandbags marking the high point the creek had reached. Their wall had held. The creek was still rushing but it had settled back within its banks, running straight and hard and tea colored. He walked back to the porch, and the lump under the blanket that was Jeannette had not stirred. It was silent, and then another sob from upstairs. Dale deliberated for a moment.

He went inside. They’re just kids, he was thinking, why are you nervous? He opened the door to the boys’ room and immediately, the crying stopped. They looked at him expectantly, red faced.

“Mom?” one of them said, trying to look around Dale to see if she was back there.

“She’s still sleeping,” Dale said. “Let’s let her sleep.” They were staring at him. The younger one was looking like he was going to start crying again. “Do you guys like coffee?”

Silence. The older one shook his head.

“I bet your mom doesn’t let you have coffee, does she? No? Well, she’s asleep so we can do whatever we want. Let’s go. We’re going to have to hurry before she wakes up and shuts us down.” Dale headed downstairs, not sure if they were going to follow. He was filling the carafe with water when they came into the kitchen, blinking, hair standing on end.

“It’s very important to do this correctly,” he said. “Come here and watch this. You’ve got to put five scoops of grounds in the filter. Okay? Five. Your mom makes coffee and she puts in four, on a good day. We’re men. Right? We want strong coffee. Five scoops. Got it?”

Serious nods.

“Okay. We need mugs. Lots of Cream. Lots of Sugar. When you get older you’ll drink it black. But this is how you start. It’s how my dad used to make mine. You don’t want to go right to the hard stuff.” They sat at the kitchen island. Each with a mug in front of him.

“Now what?” one of them asked.

“We drink our coffee. We talk about the weather.”

“It stopped raining,” one of them said, looking out the window.

“Yep,” Dale said. “I think it’s going to be a nice day.”

“It’s been raining a lot.”

“I like snow better than rain.”

“I like it when it’s sunny.”

“You guys are naturals at this,” Dale said.

Jeannette came in the back door. She had the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and her eyes were puffy. She stopped when she saw them sitting there, Dale with her two boys. He could imagine the way it looked to her. The scene almost the way it should be, one note off. If she was jarred by it, she hid it well.

“Dale made us coffee,” one of the boys said. “And we’re talking about the weather.”

Jeannette sat down. “Girls allowed?”

“I guess.”

She reached for Dale’s mug. I can’t believe I slept for so long,” she said. “Jesus. My back. I’m too old for sleeping on porches.” She was squeezing his knee under the counter, smiling at him.

“We didn’t flood,” Dale said.

“I noticed. I’m going to bake your dad a pie or something. My god, this coffee is horrible. Are you boys actually drinking this?”

“It’s good,” one of them said.

“Because we’re men,” said the other.

—

The summer progressed. Dale studied for his test. He ran in the mornings when it was still cool. Sometimes there was fog coming off the river, and when this happened he found himself picking up the pace, unable to see more than an arm’s length in front of his face, a headlong feeling. Less like running, more like falling.

He did a few more ride-alongs. A few minor incidents, nothing like that first night. He was there for a shooting. An accident, two kids playing with their dad’s handgun. The one kid shot through the leg, a puckered purple hole, his face white. Dale helped carry the stretcher and load the kid into the ambulance. “My dad is going to be so pissed,” the kid was saying. “Is this expensive? It is, isn’t it? He’s going to kill me.”

“You’re all right, man,” Dale said to him. “Your dad’s just going to be happy that you’re going to be fine. Don’t worry.”

He was feeling quietly confident about the test. About things in general. He’d made flashcards and sometimes Jeannette quizzed him, lying on the couch in the evenings after she’d put the boys to bed. She’d have her bare feet in his lap so he could rub them.

“What are the two types of cerebral vascular accidents?”

“Embolic or ischemic strokes and hemorrhagic strokes.”

“Correct-o. You’re going to kill this.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“Nonsense. You know all these forward and backward.”

“Until I sit down in that room with the clock.”

“Just imagine everyone else in the room naked. Right? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“That’s if you’re scared of public speaking.”

“It might still help, though.”

“I’ll try it and let you know.”

—

The morning of the test, Dale rose early. Jeannette, a soft, sleep-warmed shape next to him. He hadn’t seen his own bed in weeks.

She’d recently told him that if he wanted to move his stuff in, that would be fine with her. It actually sounded like a pretty good plan. He was spending so much time there anyway, it made sense. He’d be able to help with money too, just as soon as he passed the test, and the fire department could formally hire him. They’d already given him a verbal agreement. The test would make it official, and then he’d be making a decent wage.

He laced up his shoes in the dark, the house silent. He drank a full glass of water and then closed the door behind him quietly. He hit the sidewalk, his legs nearly twitching with pent-up energy. He was going to fly through this run, and then get another quick half hour of studying in before the test time. He was going to kill the goddamn test, and then his life was going to unfold in a solid, meaningful way with Jeannette, kids and all. You never can tell, he thought. You can’t predict these things.

The sun was starting to come up over the hills just outside of town. He was cruising down the river path now, breath coming easily, occasionally reaching out to brush his fingers over the deep furrows of the cottonwoods that lined the trail. Just before the 9th Street bridge, there was something — a blur on his periphery — a figure in a hooded sweatshirt holding something, coming at him in mid-swing, a stick, a bat. And then Dale was running, but his feet weren’t on the ground. Fog creeping in off the river, black fog, and Dale plunging right into it.

—

Ken hadn’t gone to coffee with the guys in a long time. He didn’t know if he was up to it or not, but he had to get out of the house someway. Last night the leaves had been blasted from the trees in one brutal windstorm. He’d gone to bed and woken up to bare limbs. Clouds forecasting snow. It had been months since he’d come down to the Albertsons like this. He went to the self-serve kiosk and got his paper cupful, pushed fifty cents into the slot in the counter. He sat down at the table, and Greg Ricci, who’d been talking, barely broke stride. He nodded at Ken. “And then I told him, I says, you have to premix the damn oil and gas. I knew this kind of stuff when I was a little kid, and this is a guy with a college education. He’d never mixed up oil and gas for a lawnmower in his whole life. I don’t know. It’s a changing world. I’m sometimes glad I’m on my way out of it.”

“Oh, hell.”

“I’m serious. You go to a bar and no one’s talking to each other. Everyone’s looking down at their phone, or whatever. I went down to Denver to see my kid. I was in the airport. The bars in the airports have all got those damn iPods. Right in front of the stool so you can’t move them. I try to order a beer with the bartender and he tells me he can’t take my order. I have to punch it in on the iPod. I says, what the hell are you standing back there for then, if you can’t take my order? And he says, well, someone still has to twist the top off it, and I says, well, watch your ass because they’ll figure a way to get around that too.” He stopped to take a sip of his coffee. “How you been, Ken?”

“Okay, considering.”

“I hear you. Nice to see you.” Nods all around.

“Yep. A bit blustery this morning.”

“No shit. My old lady is going to be on me to start raking.”

“Goddamn raking.”

“Hell with it, this might be the year I pay someone to do it.”

“Oh, bullshit, you’re too much of a tightwad.”

“We’ll see. Hey, I saw the bench they put up on the river trail for your boy, Ken. Looks like they did a real nice job.”

“It’s just a bench.”

“I know. But it’s in a good spot there. A person could sit there in the shade and see the river.”

“I don’t even know who came up with that idea. I had nothing to do with it.”

“I think it was the folks at the fire department. The other paramedics down there.”

“They never asked me.”

“Well, it’s a real nice bench. There’s a plaque and everything.”

“It’s just a bench.”

“Looks well made, though. Comfortable.”

“It’s just a fucking bench. Okay? Can we all agree on that?”

“They should have asked you.”

“We could go down there and tear the bastard out.”

“I don’t want to tear it out. It’s only a bench, and it means nothing to me. Dogs will be pissing on it long after we’re dead and buried.” Ken took a sip of his coffee. He checked to see if his hands were shaking and they weren’t. This was recent, something he’d never had to do before in his life. “You hear they’re going to start issuing wolf tags?” he said. “I think we should all go get one.”

“Kill one wolf, save a thousand elk.”

“Shoot, shovel, and shut up, that’s what I always say.”

“Goddamn right.”

—

They said that he was on his way to get her. That’s what the cops said, and she had to believe they were right. She didn’t truly think he would have harmed the boys. But who’s to say? Obviously she didn’t know him anymore and maybe she never had. She’d been saved by a traffic stop of all things. He was driving too fast through the park, and when the trooper hit his lights, Tony had sped up going the other way. He was going almost eighty, they said, when he hit the berm along the river. His car came up and over and landed in the water upside down.

Sometimes in the early morning she came awake with the feeling that a hand was on her hip, a male presence at her back. If she was still half asleep she might remember the dream she was having. Sometimes it was Dale, kind and considerate and serious, and when this was the case she woke up sad. Sometimes it was Tony, the old Tony, the one who knew her better than anyone, and on these occasions she woke up flushed and hating herself.

After it happened, weeks after the funeral, she stopped by Dale’s father’s house. She brought him a pan of lasagna. He stood in the doorway. Made no move to let her in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. His eyes saying just the opposite. “I’ll bring your pan back to you tomorrow,” he said. “And I’d appreciate if you never did anything like this again. I’d just as soon you didn’t.” He shut the door carefully and Jeannette walked home. She had to sit on the front steps for a long time before she’d found a face she could present to her sons.

—

They’d gotten a big snow overnight and school was canceled. Their mom had stayed home from work and made them hot chocolate. His little brother had the hot chocolate, but he told her he’d rather have coffee. He made sure she did it correctly, five scoops. He put a lot of cream in it and sugar and a little hot chocolate too and that was pretty good. They sat drinking in the kitchen watching the flakes come down fat and white as the pom-poms on a Christmas hat.

“Let’s get all our warm stuff on and go out to the park,” his mom said. It was her cheerful voice, the one she used a little bit before but seemed to use a lot now.

He shrugged.

“We could build a snowman,” his little brother said.

His mom was stirring her coffee. “That sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

On the way to the park, someone passed them on skis, going right down the middle of the street. The trees were coated in a thick, white blanket, the pines with their branches weighted down and sagging, so that if he bumped them they’d shed their load and spring up in a shower of fine crystal.

They made a snowman, but they hadn’t thought to bring a carrot for a nose or coal for eyes, so they just used sticks but it didn’t look quite right. He and his brother karate-kicked its head off.

He got the idea that he might like to build a snow fort. Kind of like an igloo, but also with some sticks, like a tipi. He enlisted his brother’s help. His mother helped for a while, too, but then she said she was tired and went to sit on a bench. There were some trees over there, and he could just see the river behind her. She was wearing a bright-red Livingston Fire Department hat that used to be Dale’s, and he had the thought that if snowmen had blood, their insides would look like a cherry snow cone.

When he looked up again a short time later, he saw that there was a man, sitting on the bench next to his mother. They were at opposite ends, and he was too far away to see if they were talking. It didn’t look like they were. It looked like the bench was too small for the two of them, like they didn’t want to be on it with each other. The man was wearing a bright-orange hunting cap. Neon orange. His mom had her bright hat on, and this man had his on, and everything else was white snow or gray tree trunks or black river. He stopped working on his fort wall and started to walk over. His mom thought he was a little kid still, but he wasn’t. He was ten years old now and he’d picked up a fallen cottonwood stick as big around as his wrist, and he was stomping fast through the deep snow, watching his mother the whole time.

When he got closer, he could see his mother wiping at tears, smiling. This was fairly common now too. She had her cheerful voice and then her even more cheerful wiping-away-tears voice.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m okay, honey. Say hi to Ken. We were just talking.”

“Hi, Ken.” He still had his stick resting on his shoulder. Ken’s eyes were red rimmed, and his nose was running. He was leaning over doing something with his hands in the snow next to his leg. He threw the snowball with almost no warning. “Batter’s up, kid,” was all he said.

Probably Ken thought he’d miss, but his dad had taught him how to hit a long time ago, and he was ready even though it looked like he wasn’t. He swung his cottonwood stick as hard as he could, and the snowball evaporated into a mist of cold white powder that slowly filtered down over all three of them. He could feel it melting on his neck under his collar. It turned to wet drops like tears under Ken’s cheeks. It coated his mom’s dark hair so it looked like she’d instantly gone old and gray.

“Hot damn,” Ken said. “What a cut that was. You might make the big leagues yet.”