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The boy dawdled down the road into Tenmile with the practiced nonchalance of a troublemaker, shifting along like a raccoon, miming terrific fascination at the foil wrappers and sun-scalded aluminum cans blown flat into the weeds at the side of the two-lane highway, stopping for items worthy or simply shiny, peering, sometimes picking one up, and then moving on. The sun had eased into the trees of the mountain, and Henry was at the put-in by the river watching the kid cross the bridge into town. Songbirds darted to their final assignations in the bleeding light. The bats pitched themselves at right angles into the mayflies milling above the water. Henry tossed the crust of his sandwich out his pickup window high over the river and watched as bats honed and dove for the morsel. The boy arrived at the town square. Henry started his truck and rolled alongside the boy, who did not look up.
“Son,” he said. The kid stopped. Thumbed his pockets. Henry dropped the truck into park and left the engine running. “You from around here?”
A tall, handsome kid. Vivid blue eyes, hair black and shiny as a beetle shell.
“Nope. My aunt has a place somewheres.”
“You don’t know where?”
“Nope.”
“You mind I ask her name?”
“Nope,” the boy said.
Then the boy didn’t say who his aunt was.
“You wanna give me that name?”
“My aunt?”
In the shaded dusk, Henry could not tell if the boy was a smart-ass or just profoundly stupid.
“Yes.”
A streetlamp winked twice and came full on.
“It’s Brenda Parks,” he said, straightening up into the light. “I don’t figure you know where her place is,” he said.
“There’s only six thousand people live in Tenmile, son. Get in.”
The kid smirked and looked away. Like a plan had come off or was set in motion. He dashed around the truck and got in. Said his name was Keith. He’d been praying for a ride since Forsyth, where he’d been looking for his uncle. He said he was eighteen, but Henry didn’t believe it. The scar on his arm was from a fight in Seattle. So was the tattoo. Seattle had marked him up good. But then he found Jesus, the Lord’s forgiveness. He wasn’t gonna lie about nothing no more. He had stuck needles in his arm and had been on the wrong path. He wasn’t gonna lie about it. He was saved and had decided to find his aunt, see if he could get a clean start. His uncle—the one in Forsyth—said she was in Tenmile, so that’s how Keith come to be here. All of this was the truth.
“I see,” Henry said at the conclusion of this biography. They went past the bars, the barbershop, and Dairy Queen, then out on the county road.
“This some kind of fire truck?” the kid asked.
Henry said it was. The first water tender he owned, in fact. A twelve-hundred-gallon tank bolted and welded to a Ford F-150. Did the boy have a driver’s license? Would he be looking for work? Could he study up for the kind of test you need to take to drive an even bigger truck and operate a pump and enter into the profession of wildfire fighting and dust suppression? Henry smiled at the boy over the last part as if to say it really wasn’t a profession at all, that the boy’d almost be doing him a favor to take the job.
“Holy shit.” The kid fairly vibrated at his good fortune. “Pardon me.”
Henry plucked a business card off the dash.
“Keith, you come out to this address tomorrow morning at eight. Ask for my mother, Kelly, to get you started on the paperwork.”
“Holy cow.”
Henry pulled into the drive. A grave unsmiling old woman hefted herself out of a wicker chair on the porch and tilted her head back to look at them stopping.
“One favor. You tell your aunt who gave you a job.”
“I sure will.” He scanned the card for Henry’s name. “Thanks, Mr. McGinnis.”
“Folks call me Daddy. Tell your aunt that Daddy brought you home. Daddy got you a job already.”
Henry went to the Sunrise Café. The old boys down there, the farmers, loggers, and the cripples and layabouts drawing social security. He used to bring his daughter Jill when she was little, pigtailed or tutued, and she’d carry on daddydaddydaddydaddy Daddayyy until he stopped whatever he was doing and gave her a quarter for the gumball machine or sent her around the corner to the tobacco shop to get him a cigarillo and a candy cane, don’t tell your mother, wink. Spoiled her mostly. So the old boys got to calling him Daddy. And over the years it spread to his crew, his clients, his suppliers, the parts guys, and the rest of the town. Now everybody called him that.
The old boys all said Hey Daddy when he came in. They were fingering their change, braiding rope, and watching out the window for something to occur. All cowboy hats and cigarettes and coughing and taking medications. Pearl-snap buttons like a line of aspirin clinging to the rondure of their guts.
Old Burt waved Henry over with a big red arm tufted white with hair that gave him the pink aspect of a prize pig. Burt had suggested the previous autumn that maybe Henry should run for mayor, said that a picture of Henry—thick-necked and flannelled and smiling—would look just about boss with two words right under him: Vote Daddy. Everybody knowing Henry McGinnis. Everybody liking Henry McGinnis.
Henry had said he’d think on it.
He sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. Burt read aloud the rodeo results from the paper. He turned and folded the paper and glanced at Henry and spoke to the room in general.
“Says here a kid was attacked by an owl,” Burt said. “Cross-country skiing up in the high country with his family it says.”
“A goddamned owl?” old Rosignol asked. “Let me see that.”
Burt handed the paper to Rosignol and went over to where Henry sat. They shook and greeted one another.
“Take a walk?”
“Make that a to-go Marcie.”
Henry expected another entreaty but not the whole gang filing out after them. Burt took his arm, the rest of the old boys trailing behind. They talked about the owl and Rosignol and Rosignol’s new F-150 pickup and arrived at the end of the square, where beyond was a squat row of bars and after that nothing but an empty field and then the timber. Henry stopped. At a gesture from Burt, the others crossed the street and went to the courthouse in the middle of the square. Burt cleared his throat, the effort showing in the quilting of his throat.
“Have you all decided?” he asked.
Henry said he was thinking about it.
“You’d make a helluva mayor Henry. You pay well. You bring business. Hell, you are the Tenmile Chamber of Commerce. Running for office? Shit. Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing. Imagine what you could do, all the business connections you got in Polson. And Kalispell?”
Burt had Henry’s shoulder pinched ever so lightly in his fingers and thumb. Henry waited until it was uncomfortable for Burt to leave it there, then he spoke.
“Let me get this straight. You’d have me employ the town. You’d have me bring business here. And now you’d have me run for mayor and govern.” Burt grinned at his boots. “Is there anything else can I do for you, Burt?”
He looked up at Henry under his flaring white brows, palmed his nape, and said, “Well, I got this crick in my neck.”
Henry just sucked his teeth at the joke. The old boys milled around the courthouse lawn, looking for some sign of what was decided.
“All kidding aside,” Henry said. “You know what seventy percent of my business is? Dust. I piss on dirt for a living.”
Burt narrowed his expression, rubbed his jaw. Said, “And you feel like what you got already is just about your fair portion.”
“Something like that.”
Burt nodded, thought better of what he was about to say, and punched Henry soft in the arm.
“We’ll line up behind you. All I can say is, you’d make a fine mayor, Daddy.”
What Henry believed in was family and that all the blessings in his life proceeded from this belief. He was the richest man in Tenmile—even if that wasn’t saying much—and he put close to seventy grand in wages in the town’s pockets the year prior. Martha Baumgartner even thanked him for hiring her boy in a rambling four-page letter, the upshot of which was that her son Ben had been about to join the Marines or go to college, and Henry had saved the boy from both of those evils. He wrote her back saying the kid was a natural grease monkey and born water tender driver, even though neither was true. Henry hired young and he hired dumb. It was that simple.
The kid who’d walked into town, Keith, was no different. Worse, if possible. Poor in the uptake of new information and skills. Little inherent work ethic or simple sticktoitiveness. It took the better part of April to get him certified. On a practice run up to Tub Gulch, Henry followed in another truck as the boy pissed 3,000 gallons of potable on the road. Henry tried the CB. The logging road was too narrow to pass, so he honked and flashed his lights. Nothing.
When they got to the site, Henry asked was his damn radio broke.
The kid flipped it on. Said that it didn’t look like it was.
Henry took off his cap and worked his temples. The kid watched him closely, like Henry was at charades. Henry beckoned him to the back of the truck and showed him where the valve dripped the last drops of the water. The kid asked him what happened.
“You didn’t close the cam lock is what happened.”
“Shit.”
“Imagine there’s a dirty, hungry, thirsty fire crew up here. Needing to cook and shower. I want you to imagine them looking at you right now.”
The boy peopled the meadow with sincere concentration.
“Man,” he said with considerable awe. “I bet they’d be fuckin’ pissed.”
Henry’s daughter Jill was something Henry liked to show off when she was younger, somewhere between the MEC 650 shotgun-shell reloader in his den and the pressure washers and concrete drains he had installed out in the truck bay. At parties and barbecues, he used tell her to come on over and do that dance she learned in that dance class down in Polson. She’d ask which one suspiciously, and he’d say the one that was costing him an arm and a leg, to his guests’ laughter, her embarrassment. He’d soothe her on his knee. Times he could coax a warbled tune out of her. But as she grew taller and plumper and her talents more vague, he quit asking her to do anything for company. She would just stand there looking at her phone or pluck some invisible sweater pill or dandelion seed from her new bosom, and ignore whoever her father wanted her to meet, men who now seemed content to just look at her and did not laugh. Not at all.
The case with Keith was likewise. She came around the house as Henry was explaining to the nigh-idiot why you don’t simply pour the old engine oil into the ditch. Henry called her over to meet the kid, but she didn’t hear or didn’t care and went out on the dirt road. She crossed it kicking white dust up to the hem of her dress with her cowboy boots, and dipped into the ditch opposite looking for something, pointing it out to herself, ducking down to get it. She mounted the road grunting and came back. Along her thigh she swung a dead chicken by the neck. Henry called her again, and she came over with the bird.
With her other hand she typed something on her phone, who knew what. “Another’n got out and got hit,” she said. A pickup full of boys barreled up the road as if to prove her point. She raised a chin at them and grinned vaguely in the direction they were headed.
Henry pecked her on the cheek, put an arm around her, which she seemed mainly to tolerate. “This is Jill,” he said.
Keith’s mouth slowly opened but he didn’t say anything with it.
Henry told Keith she was homeschooled and raised animals in 4-H and had already taken practice tests of the SAT and wanted to be a veterinarian or maybe even a pilot, and though it would kill him, she would probably go to college in Washington or at least the University of Montana. He pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Daddy,” she said. “Don’t.”
Keith watched him kiss her cheek. She had a toothpick in her mouth and moving it around in there made a powerful impression. The chicken bled. Spots of blood on her dress, her boot.
“Keith wants to go into the ministry,” Henry announced.
Jill squinted up at the late morning sun, yawned, and fluffed the dead bird’s white feathers.
“You got a little blood on you,” Keith said, pointing at her foot.
“I better clean up,” she said, ducking out from under her father’s arm.
“I’ll see you at church then?” Keith said to her.
She backed away, dead chicken, sundress, toothpick, smile.
“If you sit by the window you will.”
As the weeks went on, Henry’s mother Kelly came to adore Keith. Mornings Henry’d come into the dispatch office where she kept the books and find the boy leaning over the desk showing her a thing he’d drawn and wanted to tattoo on his shoulder. Things he said were straight out of Revelations, dragons and horsemen. Visions more commonly airbrushed on vans.
“You don’t got nothing to do?” Henry would say to him.
“Sure thing, Daddy.”
His mother smiled and shook her head as the boy departed.
“I thought you hated tattoos,” he said to his mother. He dropped into the office chair on clicking casters and groaned with the springs.
“I do. He’s just something else to listen to.”
“Listen to?”
“To look at then.” She fluttered her eyelashes, making fun of herself.
“Mother.”
She shrugged.
Now in his fifties, Henry had come to look like her in the mouth and jowl, and it bothered him, though he never thought so in actual words. Just a feeling he had, passing a mirror. His resemblance to her had nearly startled him when Burt brought over that Vote Daddy poster he’d done up. Now he saw her mouth in the mirror every time he shaved. How we are each a late version of someone preceding us.
“He’s got Jill in a lather,” she said.
Maybe he’d grow a mustache or beard. He wondered how that would look on a Vote Daddy poster.
“Asking if she can bring me my lunch and every other thing just to get a look at him,” she said.
“What?”
“Jill.”
“Jill what?”
“And Keith.”
Henry scoffed.
“He’s an idiot.”
“Why’d you hire him then?”
Henry leaned forward and scanned the large calendar on the desk for upcoming jobs. She watched him a minute and then got up and went to the file cabinet, stopped, turned around, and sat again. He glanced up.
“What?” he said.
“Because of Brenda Parks.”
“How’s that now?”
“Brenda’s popular with them in the church, and he’s her nephew. So if you were to run for mayor—”
“Mama, I ain’t running for mayor. We need a lot more jobs or a big fire season to cover our nut.” He tapped the blank week on the calendar. “You don’t know how dry it’s gonna be this summer.”
“Maybe the mayor’s allowed to start forest fires,” she said wryly.
She looked at him with a face that was his face, and it embarrassed him. The thought of all those posters going up all over.
The fires up past Deerwater, deep in the Purcell Range, issued from a spectacle of heat lightning that lit the night sky an awful purple like some kind of novel ordnance. The dawn met grim pennants of smoke, and by then the fires had scorched several thousand acres. Tenmile smelled of smoke and then a nicotine halo shrouded the sun and to go outside was to come back in smelling like a campfire.
The wildfire was big and close. By noon Henry and his crew had already been up to the fire camp at Fourth of July Creek three times, filling the huge bladders of potable and the remote dip tanks for the helicopters, and pumping straight from the Kootenai River and racing up the mountain to douse the fire line directly. Sweltering smokejumpers manifested at the roadside in small bands, coated in soot. Henry stopped and sprayed the men down. A crew of trench diggers and chainsaw men marching up the road stopped when Henry honked and they too stood in the spray and trudged Indian-file dripping back into the lodgepoles to help set backfires.
Henry was heading back to camp in the late afternoon when his mother radioed. Keith. The kid had attached a potable bladder to the water truck, opened the valve, and wandered off for a cigarette. When he came back the mess chief was screaming murder about the pond under his kitchen. A number of the firefighters’ individual tents were flooded, their clothes and belongings sopping wet. Keith had banjaxed half the camp.
“Fire him.”
“Henry—”
He cut her off but knew she couldn’t hear him until she quit speaking into the CB, so he repeated himself: “Fire him. Fire him. Fire him.”
“He’s just a kid—”
Henry flipped off the CB.
Reputation was everything, mayoral candidate or not. Henry went straight to the campsite and helped the mess crew tote the propane tanks and kitchen burners to dry ground, strung up lines by himself, hung clothes and sleeping bags, and met the truckloads of sooted firefighters coming off the mountain in the dark, explaining and apologizing. Most of them were too bushed to do any worse than brush by him, drop their pulaskis, and curl up on the ground like dogs.
It rained, first in timid drops that impinged Henry’s dusty lot in polka dots and then in great waving drapes across the meadow in back of his property. A full day of small drizzle under gray shapeless scud and witchy cold. Henry cooked a can of chili on his dash heater as he sat on standby at the fire camp. At least everything was wet now. Maybe they’d forget. He realized, with relief, that none of these firefighters were from Tenmile, that none would vote here. Then this relief embarrassed him.
He finally got the all-clear to go home in the dark downpour, ate mutely with his wife, and fell asleep to the purl of gutter water by the window. He woke before dawn, before the rooster cockadoodle, with it still raining or raining again. He fixed his coffee and eggs. The day lit. The rain eased.
Going out to drop a bag of garbage in the dumpster, he discovered Brenda Parks’s Buick behind the outbuilding. For a moment he wondered what her car was doing there. Where it could not be seen from the house. He pitched his coffee into the wet grass and jogged back the inside.
He flung open Jill’s bedroom door. Her head thrown back, clutching her robe closed over her chest, her own hand over her mouth. The boy’s legs such that it only slowly dawned on Henry she was astraddle him backwards. He watched the boy’s toes curl. Jill didn’t even notice him.
When Keith slunk out to the car, Henry stepped from behind the dumpster and crowned him with shovel handle. Henry slipped and nearly fell in the mud.
“I ever see you again, I won’t stop. You hear me?”
Keith goggled at the inchoate blur talking to him.
“You hear me?”
“I can’t hear anything this ringing in my ear.”
Henry hit him again, hard in the knee. Keith scrambled into his car, turned it over, and went away forever.
Henry had, in fact, witnessed his grandson’s conception. Had occasioned it, one could say, hiring that boy loping into town. All of the trouble fell squarely in his lap.
What Henry did not see but imagined and could not stop imagining: Keith sniffing around the house, sidling up, ogling and charming and seducing his daughter. It was Henry’s whole setup that was to blame, then. Putting this kind of business on the same property as his house. His family. It seemed so inevitable now. Did he not know the sheer natural fact that since she was thirteen, his crew had thought and spoke crudities about her, sexual and violent animal things, snatches of which had wafted into her ears as she passed the outbuildings to fetch her grandmother or these very men for dinner, things they said involving parts of her body, and which pooled in her thoughts and made her picture herself as a mere constituency of thigh and neck and breast?
He did know. He could not unhear these things any more than she.
In fact, his silence was permission.
A man with a placard waited across the street, already at this hour of the morning. WHAT PART OF “THOU SHALT NOT KILL” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? read his sign. Leaning on the placard and sipping his coffee, the man watched them pull in and back out of a STAFF ONLY space right up front. His face untroubled, a little optimistic even. He stood on the street corner in front of a hotel. The hotel sign said Welcome Soroptimists.
Henry’s family hadn’t been down to Missoula in years and they would not be back for years more. He drove around and around the clinic in wider and wider circles. So early in the morning and with no one on the sidewalks, it was astonishing how many cars there were, the dearth of spaces. They entered an unpromising lot. Even the handicapped spaces were taken. Henry parked on the grass under a tree. They could just ticket him then.
He told Jill and Reba to wait in the pickup. The maple trees were grand and cool. Showing off. In Tenmile, no one had planted trees. Trees were for the mountains. But here. It was an initiative to have planted trees. Henry would plant trees in Tenmile when he was mayor. In the town, around the bald square. Take care of this business and plant trees.
Yes. He wanted to be mayor. If he was mayor, perhaps he would deserve his life.
The clinic was a brick house on a rise above street level. Henry mounted the steps that ran through a cinderblock wall. A guard picking up trash in the grass told Henry that the clinic wouldn’t open until the doctor arrived, but Henry was welcome to wait out front. Henry looked across the street at the man leaning on his sign and sipping his coffee. The man tugged up his sleeve to look at his watch, as if waiting for his shift to start.
“He don’t get holy rolling until he finishes his coffee,” the guard said. “But don’t worry. He can’t come within a hundred feet of here.”
A car pulled up in the staff spot. A nurse, from the look of her pink scrubs, parked her sedan in front of the cinderblock wall and asked did the guard want her to run for donuts.
“Oh come on now, you witch,” he said to her. “She’s undermining my willpower,” he said to Henry, tapping his gut. “Now lookit that. She went and got them already anyhow.”
The nurse set the donuts on the hood of her car, shrugged innocently.
Henry said he’d wait with his family in the yonder lot. He pointed in that direction, but the guard was telling the nurse to get them donuts up to him pronto. He went and sat on the bench by the front door and rubbed his hands together.
When Henry got to down to street level, the man with the placard nodded at him like a coach on the opposite sideline. Henry had a mind to go over there, but that was it. Just a mind to go over, no idea what he’d say to the fellow. And the wind was odd. From the windrows it gusted up last year’s old gray leaves. They spread like an opening palm and fell into a sudden stillness.
When the explosion happened, it rattled and blurred the visible world, it hurt his teeth, and he expected something collapsing, something falling from the sky. He pivoted around into a crouch between two cars, and when the guard’s body dropped into the street before him, he did not immediately recognize it as such and looked up wondering generally now what the fuck are they doing now the goddamn sonofabitches, hot debris pelting him and smoking the sonofabitches. Jesus. A white cloud of smoke in front of the clinic. Burning green leaves.
The taillights on the car were flashing, the noise—car alarm. He warily rose, scanning the street. The flashing lights of other vehicles in automatic hysterics. The smoke caught in one of those odd gusts shunted sideways down the street and halted just like a person might stop to take in this scene. He turned and could just make out Reba and Jill inside the pickup in the distant lot, what confused expressions they wore. He touched his chest to show them he was fine and gestured at them to stay put.
He warily approached the guard in the middle of the empty street. He’d been blown out of his shoes, his clothes, naked save his service belt. The exposed bones of his glistening face were flensed and obscene. He did not move or even bleed, just smoked and in places bubbled.
Screaming. From somewhere, screaming.
Henry made for the nurse next to her car. Burned donuts sweet in the air. A trace of aqua fortis. When Henry knelt, he cut his hand on the car. He sucked his hand and looked where an array of hot nails and screws spiked out of the fender, and told of a homemade bomb he would realize later. He bent over the nurse, her scrubs ripped open and bloody as the day she was born. From black holes the length of her seeped ribbons of blood. But she drew breaths and screamed again. Again and again like an infant. Henry felt for her jugular, femoral, auxiliary arteries. He tilted her to check underneath and her clothes and backside were pristine. He took her quivering hand.
She passed out or simply quit shrieking. He checked her breath and her pulse again, both faint and steady. People arrived, blanched, and departed. Someone touched his shoulder, uttered things, and left. There was a vibration in his pocket. He would realize later it was his phone, his wife calling and calling him from the pickup.
The police and paramedics arrived and pulled him from the woman’s side, and he heard his daughter yelling, “Daddy! DADDY!” He swagged heavily to the truck. Jill and Reba shouted at him for leaving them there and not answering his phone and slapped and clutched at him as he negotiated the key into the ignition, started the truck, and got them the hell gone. Saying, “Okay okay okay.”
Henry and his mother, wife, and daughter sat around the kitchen table, silent. Jill rubbed her belly as if her pregnancy were evident. The coffee had ceased steaming and the sun had gone up so far during their muted impasse that there was just a little quadrangle of light on the corner of the table. Like the last slice of cake. A housefly planed figure eights.
Jill had changed her mind.
Henry said that nothing had changed. They had decided before and what was settled was still settled. He set his palms on the table to indicate finality.
Kelly got up and rinsed her cup in the sink. Reba fingernailed a spot of cream on the table, ran rays from it. Jill jiggled in the chair like it was hot or vibrating under her, waiting for her mother or her grandmother to say something. She looked hard at her mother.
“You said we never should have gone, Mama. You said that.”
Henry passed his bandaged hand across his forehead as if to smooth the thoughts in there. What Jill said was true. On the way back Reba prayed. Begged forgiveness, thanked the Lord for sparing Henry. Said to God that they never should have gone to the clinic. Now she only nodded.
“He doesn’t even know,” Jill said. “Keith will come back when he knows he’s a daddy.”
“He’s a fuckwit,” Henry said.
Jill leaned forward and spilled her hair onto the table. Sobbed there. “We could keep it,” she said, her voice hard and wet on the wood under her hair.
“No, it’s not—”
“If you just loved it, Daddy.”
His words were like flintsparks, hot, quick, and seeking fuel: “I won’t ever love it, Jill.”
Her face rose white and ominous, and she stood, and a good majority of her love for him evaporated right then forever.
She went to her room, slammed her door, of course. The fly landed on her cup. Disappeared over the lip of it.
Reba leaned on an elbow toward him. “I’m gonna pretend,” she said, “that what happened, what awful things you saw, is why you just said that.”
“Wonderful,” Henry said. “You changed your mind, too.”
But she was already away from the table.
His mother was leaning against the sink, looking at him sadly. He’d never seen her cry. She didn’t now, but this was close to it.
“Christ, you too?” he asked.
“No. Not that.”
“Then what?”
“Henry. You’re my son. You could’ve been killed.”
He tasted his cold coffee, got up, and went out the side door.
That he could have been killed did not change how he felt. People die and people almost die all the time. Only the fortune in his life would ever astonish him. His ten water trucks, the nurse tankers, the 5,000-gallon water tenders. Four buildings. Mountains all around, and the acreage on three sides his too. That was a miracle. Death you could count on. His life he wasn’t so sure he deserved.
He walked out to the truck bay. A pair of his crew were grab-assing when he came up in the cavernous outbuilding, and they snapped to at the sight of him.
“Hey Mr. McGinnis. We about got this one lubed.”
“Good. Where’s the rest of you all?”
“Jeff and Church went for them parts you ordered. Ken and Ben are getting our lunch. Nick’s around.”
The two young men stood there greased to the elbows and waiting for him to say something. Warm oil in the air.
“You all can knock off early. Say, three?”
“Sure thing, Daddy.”
The heating sun made a corrugated panel boom into shape and sounded like someone had dropped a rubber hammer on it, and he flinched. The young men witnessed this without comment, glanced a couple times at his bandaged hand. Henry asked if they heard what had happened. They had.
“Was it gnarly?”
“Yes.”
“Man.”
“So it’s got around then?” Henry asked. “That we were down there? What we were down there for?”
They nodded. Henry put his hands on hips and affected an authority he didn’t feel.
“I want to be really clear,” Henry said. “I don’t want any of you talking to my family about what happened. Any of you breathe a goddamn word about it to Mrs. McGinnis or my daughter and you’re fucking fucked.”
“We wasn’t—”
“You hear?”
“Yessir.”
“In fact, don’t talk to her at all. Don’t so much as talk about her or look at her or nothing. I so much as get a whiff of you thinking about her, you’ll lose more than your goddamned job.”
Despite his efforts, Henry could not bury the incident and get them on with their lives. Two detectives from Missoula—nice enough, mustached and earnest and not even taking notes—had a hard time believing Henry or his family didn’t see anybody except the man with the placard. And the FBI agents in their black sedans and black sunglasses had a harder time. All those cars at the scene, and not one single person before the blast? The bomb had a remote detonator, not a timer. Someone had seen them—Henry and his family—and had decided to spare them. They should think about that, the FBI said.
Reba wouldn’t even listen to Henry about another clinic, the one in Spokane. At supper, Jill and Reba closed ranks—sitting close and stubborn and binary in some new and powerfully thwarting way—and left him puncturing the air with his fork when he tried to change their minds. And the sun went down, him at the dining room table, through the picture window there. An explosion of light from under the clouds and above the trees as the sun gloried in the last of the day. The murmuring behind Jill’s closed door was unbearable.
He went to his mother’s. She sat on the porch swing that his father had made and that to this day didn’t so much as creak. A filigree of roses on the armrests. The sheer skill and love in it. He sat next to her on it.
“She’s fifteen,” he said.
“Pshaw. In my day, you got pregnant, you got married. I’s fourteen, you recall.”
“I know.”
“Like I used to say, if you don’t like me, blame your father. He raised me.”
“I hate when you say that.”
Her cackling had startled a starling from the eaves.
“There ain’t a lick of him in my face, you know that? It’s all your side of the family,” he said.
“That’s too bad. He was a handsome devil.” She pushed the swing with her feet. “How’s your hand?”
“It’s fine.” He touched it. “I’m okay. I was really lucky.”
She nodded. “You want something to drink?”
He turned to her.
“Why you all like him so much?” he asked. “That kid, I mean.”
“Keith? I don’t know that we like him so much. Some people just have charisma, and you believe in them.” She touched a rose on the armrest. “I got some sun tea in there.”
“I’m all right. I just feel so helpless.”
“You’re far from helpless, Henry. You’re wonderful. You’re more successful than I ever imagined. But you’re just Jill’s daddy. And my boy.”
He felt hot shame like he hadn’t felt since he’d been a child, and she brought him sun tea but the glass sweated in his bandaged hand and he wanted something stronger, so he left.
He drank often. Afternoons alone in his office with a bottle or in his pickup by the river. An evening he spent a few hours at pinball in the Ten High with glasses of cold beer. The air conditioner cooled and then goosebumped his arms and neck. He felt considerably better. Burt and some of the old boys came in with wadded currency for dollar poker and bags of fried chicken that bloomed dark with grease. The belled pinball music gave him away in the corner, and Burt waved him over. His beer was empty so he went up to the bar and ordered another. The old men smoothing out their dollars looked up under hooded crow-footed eyes with something like sorrow in them, and Henry knew.
“A little walk, Burt?”
They took their beers outside with them. They squinted against the sunset until their pupils pinned, and then walked away from the sun boring into the mountains.
“How you all doing?” Burt asked.
“Fine.”
“Anything we can do. Just let me know.”
“Sure.”
“They find out who—”
“They don’t know shit.”
“Some kind of world we got going on.”
They didn’t stop at the end of the square but instead walked along the road out of town and to the bridge where they leaned over the rail. Henry spat into a pool just below them and fish the color of the stones, brown and green, flicked and dashed away.
“All because of our business down in Missoula. Our private business,” he said.
“Come again?”
“Why you’re gonna drop me,” Henry said.
He looked at Burt, and Burt watched the water dishing the two of them faintly in the pool
“Well now, there was that flood up at the fire camp. That’s a black eye right there. Now, I know that isn’t your fault. But there it is anyhow.”
Henry drank. Burt set his large pink hand on Henry’s shoulder.
“The boys asked if I’d throw my hat in. We’d like to have you aboard, Daddy.”
Henry removed the hand. Told Burt what he could do with his hat.
On the Fourth of July, a roman candle caught the brush behind the old auto shop. Henry got a single truck out there at the same time the rural fire department arrived. The kids who were responsible for the fire scattered like tomcats when Henry spotted them peeking out from a pile of tires. The department fighters headed for the timber that was starting to catch, while Henry and a couple of his boys drove right into the thigh-high flames in the field with the back sprinklers blasting. The fire uncovered old Fords and Studebakers that stood out stark and abstract, their smoking frames hissing where the water hit them.
Henry and his crew fetched shovels from behind the cab and went to putting out hot spots by turning sod. The wet and black earth steamed where they worked. The fire department guys looked like they had a handle on the flames on the mountainside, but it was hard to tell what was going on in the smoke and the thick of the timber. For a while they watched a red city fire truck spray the wilderness. Large hawks sat nearly motionless and cruciate in thermal updrafts, looking for rabbits and mice flushed out by the flames.
“Let’s go look for spot fires,” Henry said to his boys, “before they have a chance to make more trouble.”
They spread out and went to work. Just beyond the smoldering area in front of him, a large hawk swooped down, snatched something from the wet unburned grasses, gliding low near the smoking earth, before it pumped itself skyward. Henry went to where this hawk had found prey. He moved his boot in the bearded darnel and wild columbine there, turning up clutch of wet eggshelled pheasants on folded wings not yet for flying. Moving like bats on their elbows and just as blind. Henry gripped the shovel and stood guard over the hatchlings, certain that they all had another thing coming.