A Bloom of Bones. Allen Morris Jones
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letters. Just sporadic wads of cash appearing through the mail. Curt learned by example: Money is the opposite of guilt. The payments came in envelopes postmarked Billings, the address handwritten in block letters. For a man who despised his father, every envelope was a punch in the nose. Two hundred bucks here, five hundred bucks there, it added up. The twins needed braces. His ranch truck dropped a transmission. The old man would be seventy, seventy-five years old now. Wasn’t he curious about his grandkids? If times weren’t so hard, Curt would have just tossed the cash in the furnace. But times were hard. It was a bitter pill, swallowed on a near-daily basis.
When Pete’s body eroded out of the hillside, Grady Fisk called Curt. “You need to meet me down on Cherry Creek.” And while this was not an especially unusual occurrence (the Breaks keep releasing ancient bodies; skulls and teeth and finger bones, copper kettles and stone axes and medicine bundles) the list of people with names gone missing in Garfield County was only a few lines long.
Grady and his deputy worked with shovel and pick while Curt hunkered on his heels, smoking. Grady tossed him a leather wallet. “Look familiar?” A gritty fold of leather filled with twenty-three dollars of antique cash. “Yeah, that’s his.” Grady and his deputy gingerly lifted the curled corpse into a body bag, the desiccated bones held stiffly together by the leathered skin, lips stretched back to reveal yellow, horsey teeth. The eyes were sunk knuckle deep into the skull and his hands were drawn in like claws. Then the legs. Each one needed a separate trip back into the hole. “Goddamn, Grady. Who’d do such a thing?” Curt was close to tears.
“We’ll get him.” But it was only talk. Grady had been in this job for two years. Before that, he’d been a roughneck down in Kemmerer. Fisks are one of the three families in the county with enough votes to sway any election, elect whichever cousin cares to attach himself to the government teat. Grady ran unopposed, but to his credit worked the job in good faith. A decent man. He’d gone to Helena to learn how to handle a crime scene, collect evidence. Rubber gloves and Ziploc baggies, Luminol and Locard’s exchange principle. Whole nine yards. But they’d never talked about murder scenes that were thirty years gone.
He stretched the body bag out on his tailgate. The whole package smaller than you’d think. This is what we all boil down to. A wad of dried husks. Grady zipped the bag up to the corpse’s sternum, then paused. A patch of the grave-rotted T-shirt seemed stained a slightly darker brown. He used a pencil to pull back a scrap, reveal a collarbone, a xylophone-scroll of ribcage.
Peering over his shoulder, Curt said, “Is that a bullet hole?”
Mistake, inviting Curt to the crime scene. He could see it now. Rookie mistake. Grady was always berating himself for these types of errors. Was the job too big for him? He looked at Curt and saw how easily grief could segue to anger, anger to violence. “We’ll do an autopsy. I’ll let you know.”
“It is, isn’t it? A goddamned bullet hole.” He touched his eyes with the back of a wrist.
“Curt.”
“I’m good. I’m good.”
Later, saying goodbye, they shook hands. Grady kept hold of Curt’s for a minute. “You’re thinking about paying a visit to Eli.”
Curt didn’t bother to deny it.
“Hold off awhile. Let me talk to him first.”
Curt took his hand back. Brought a trembling cigarette to his mouth. “Never liked that guy much. Always thought he was maybe a little queer. All that poetry and shit.”
“Just let me talk to him.”
“You know well as me who did this.”
“I got ideas, yeah. But ideas don’t mean nothing. Put yourself in my shoes. Just hold off.”
Curt coughed, spat. Handsome when he shaved and bathed, he didn’t have a handsome man’s confidence. It was an effort for him to look any man in the eye. He glanced downhill, considered the fresh mound of clay, the hillside that had only recently held his father. He’d driven past this spot ten thousand times. “Just how long? How long you expect me to hold off?”
WAKING UP ON THE third morning of her visit, taking the measure of her own humors, Chloe found anger, frustration, a bubbling, subsurface sob. She could have been in Yellowstone Park about now, maybe driving Montana’s back roads, discovering saloons, cute little historical museums. Instead, Jesus, just look at her. Sweltering at six in the morning, staring up at a yellow fly strip clotted with gnats, moths.
Singer’s poetry had emotion, energy, color, but she found the life behind that poetry curiously translucent. Thirty years spent inside this house. He said he’d been the youngest child and that made sense. He had a youngest-child’s plaintive air about him.
She was not a religious person. Not for her, the bureaucracy of -isms. But she did believe in accountability. At the end of it, her final breath floating to the ceiling, there would be a reckoning. What had she done with the days she’d been given? Last year she spent her vacation in a stone farmhouse in the Dordogne, bought tins of fois gras at the Saturday market in Sarlat. The year before, she had stretched out under mosquito netting in Kruger, listened to lions roar beyond the walls. All that time, Singer had been here.
Yesterday, they’d herded cows. “We’re shipping here in a week. You feel like helping me gather up some stragglers?” She hadn’t the first clue what he was talking about. But sure, why not.
Between her knees, a gentle, blaze-faced sorrel named Peaches. She whispered into a swiveling ear, “You and me are going places, honey.” Put the odor of horses in her nostrils and she was ten years old again. Photos from that period show the last honest smiles of her childhood. She and Peaches followed Singer down into the Breaks, Dante and Beckett trotting on either side. Singer said, “They like to hole up at the head end of these coulees, up where it’s cool.” The sky hot and pale. Their horses drank deeply at a stock pond, then dug at the water with their hooves. The dogs lay flat in an inch of muddy water, panting. Singer circled, leaning over to study the ground. “These yearlings will leave a track not a whole lot different from a cow elk.” In the timber, Chloe ducked for branches. Ahead of them five steers rolled to their feet, dull and astonished, then made a lumbering break for it. “Just let your horse there have her head. She knows what to do.” Chloe’s mare circled, shifted her weight, cut back and forth up the hill. Singer whistled to the dogs, pointing. The dogs flanked the steers, nipping. A few hours later, Chloe dismounted, rubbing her knees. “Is that the Fort Peck down there?” Ten, twelve times a day Singer would stop to scribble a note, a stub of a carpenter’s pencil tight in his fist. Then he’d look around, briefly pleased. He ignored her question about Fort Peck (too obvious?), and she said, “Is that your little poetry notebook?”
He retreated to his Skoal can, thumping it hard with a forefinger. Little. “That’s my little mind-your-own-business notebook.”
He was attracted to her. Of course he was. His eyes went to her breasts, to her hips . . . but then, nada. All the normal gestures that preceded seduction—lingering touches, hands on shoulders, quick little neck massages—they were all absent. Did he think he was too old for her? It would be sweet if it weren’t so frustrating. The gears that churn within men, the machinery that forces them after women? His were somehow all gummed up.
After a day in the saddle, woozy from wind and light and heat, she felt closer to him. He glanced at the Roman numeral count he’d written in pen on the palm of his hand, “Only three short. Pretty good day.”
“What’s for dinner there, Mr. Singer?”
Hamburgers, and a 1997 Stag’s Leap Cabernet. He tasted the wine, raised his eyebrows. “Uh huh. I see it now. I mean, yeah.” Bullshit, of course, but she appreciated the effort. They went to the couch. He had planned their first night’s entertainment—his records—but hadn’t thought so far as the second. “I got some old movies we could watch?” In a cabinet, dusty VHS versions of Lethal Weapon, Michael Keaton as Batman, Shrek. Everything you could get for five dollars at Walmart twenty years ago. She said, “How about we just sit and