They sat on the bed, Jack rubbing his head with both hands, Laura staring out the small window. He followed her gaze. She was looking at Boots, who was sitting silently on the front porch.
“You could be nicer, Jack.”
“Yeah.” He started rubbing his head again.
She turned and studied him. “He did save us. At least try to be civil.”
“All right.”
“It’s just sometimes, you can be a little short—”
“Got it!”
Jack stood up. He hated everything in the world at that moment. The air in the bedroom became stifling, and he made for the door. Laura didn’t say anything more. He could sense her watching him through the window as he stumbled off the front porch and started walking around the house. He threw a quick glance back at Boots, whose eyes were following him with apathetic detachment.
The cabin was as unremarkable outside as it was in. The yard was nothing as such. Rock and dirt trailed off into the horizon from every side. Out back, there was the pen where the mare loafed, taking turns at the water trough between saunters in the baking sun. Farther back was the post fence with weeds and cacti shooting up sporadically between intentionally placed stones. The cemetery. Jack walked up to the fence and looked out onto the field. A haunting filled his gut.
He thought about the highway.
How close to death had they been? How close had their bones been from being whitewashed in the desert wind’s sandblaster? The day out on the blacktop still lingered as a hung-over mystery. He could see it in his mind like snapshots: the road, the water bottle on the floorboard, a horse in a rearview mirror, blackness.
It was the blackness that gnawed at the back of his neck. Hallucination, that’s what it must have been. The effects of dehydration. Blindness. But this pit in his stomach suggested that deep down inside, it was something more. He had seen something out there on the highway. Something that flayed him open and exposed all the worst parts of him.
His mind searched like a defragging hard drive, attempting to put the files back together. Just then he heard footsteps approaching behind him and the recall ceased.
“You sure you’re fit to be out here? Should be inside resting yourself.”
Jack stared off, acknowledging Boots’s presence with a slight glance, but not saying a word.
“Not too many folk in there worth the time for talk,” Boots said as he stepped beside Jack and nodded toward the grave markers.
Jack looked at him. Was this desert monk a serial killer hoping to add the two of them to his macabre collection of bones? The old man was crazy, Jack was sure of that, but he didn’t feel that Boots was that crazy.
“Some of them been there a long time. Longer than I’ve been here. Some I know from way back. No use carrying them way off for the coyotes to get. People knew to keep them close by.”
“You kill them yourself?”
“Ha . . . that’s a good one, Jack. Naw, ain’t no one there by my hand. Different story most of them got. Some caught fever. Others just walked out after eating and gave up the ghost. Only one thing the same in this life. We all end up there.”
“How many?”
“Not sure. Some stones ain’t got no mark. Some do. Ain’t been added to for a long time. People who come out here nowadays die on their own. Sometimes no one finds them. Sometimes they get found. Bones at least. Bones don’t tell you much, just that they’re alone.”
“Sort of insane, isn’t it? Having this right next to your house?”
“Naw, ain’t insane. Don’t get much company out here. And they don’t eat much.” Boots chuckled. “But like I say, they ain’t good at talking.”
They stood in silence as the wind picked up and blew heat into their faces.
“What are you two chatting about?” Laura asked as she walked up tentatively to the two men, her hair flowing back behind her, and a subtle bead of sweat sauntered down her temple. Boots’s face lit up in the same annoying way that the gas station clerk’s had when they stopped in Goodwell.
“Not much, just showing Jack the family album.”