A Bloom of Bones. Allen Morris Jones

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      Copyright © 2016 by Allen Morris Jones, Inc.

      All rights reserved.

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      No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:

      Ig Publishing, Inc.

      Box 2547

      New York, NY 10163

      ISBN: 978-1-632460-46-2 (Ebook)

       To my family

      Contents

Building Fence

The Coyote: Part I

      Buddy

      The Brook Trout

      Homestead Cabins

      Dear C

      The Coyote, Part II

       Building Fence

      Meadowlarks square faint

      arpeggios of wheat; dogs piss

      on street signs; me I clang metal

      to metal, pounding posts the way

      sleep pounds us or maybe grief.

      A hard unlovely bell pealing the

      world to pieces: Mine. Mine. Mine.

      Yours.

      I SAID, “THAT BIG BULLET went right on through, didn’t it?”

      It was too cold to snow but still it was snowing; a thin sheet of gauze twisting around the porch light. Buddy kicked through frozen marbles of blood, scattered at them, swept them aside with his boot. He knelt and rose, hoisting the body across one shoulder. Voice muffled by a wool scarf, he said, “Leaking?”

      “What?”

      “Is he leaking anywhere?”

      “I don’t see it.”

      “All right then.”

      “That big bullet went plumb through, didn’t it?”

      “Will you quit with the goddamned questions? Just for once?” A gentle man, Buddy rarely cussed, seldom rebuked, never raised his voice. I stood abashed, one breath from tears. He inhaled hard through his nose, shifted the body on his shoulders. “Let’s just get this done.”

      He set off toward the county road, walking fast. I ran to catch up. To the east, it was fifty miles of dirt until you hit the two saloons and five churches of Jordan; to the west, nothing but the Musselshell. At two in the morning, and barring high school kids off on a jacklighting drunk, there’d be no traffic. We had the road to ourselves.

      I huffed along beside him. “You ain’t taking the truck?”

      “You want Pete’s blood all over my truck bed?”

      “No. I guess that’s right.”

      He glanced down. “You can get on home if you want. No use for us both.”

      “I want to help.”

      “All right then.”

      “Where we taking him?”

      “I was thinking Cherry Creek. All them little eroded holes.”

      “Oh sure.”

      Our breath bloomed blue around us.

      Up on the road he said, “We don’t want to leave no tracks. Careful just to step in the ruts.”

      “All right.”

      “Just step where I step.”

      “Okay.”

      He shifted the body. “It sure turned cold on us didn’t it?”

      It was so quiet. The squeak of our boots on the snow recalled nails twisting in boards. We were the first or last men on earth. Lone survivors of an epidemic, an ice age.

      Eye level in front of me, bouncing against Buddy’s back, Pete’s shock of hair had frozen into a stiff brush of frost, a rigid, cartoonish explosion of fright. His eyes were open, and a rime of snow had collected in the lashes.

      After a time, Buddy left the road. He stood waiting for me to open the gate. Grabbing the post, my gloves came away scaled silver with hoarfrost. He led us a hundred yards or so into the pasture before dropping one shoulder, letting the body slump off into the snow. He stretched his back and studied the sky, the stars showing through. “Looks fair to clear.”

      It was a porous ground around us now, hidden under the drifted calluses of old snow. A honeycomb of ditches and pipes carved before the spring had been piped and controlled. Buddy began walking in circles, kicking at drifts. “That good round one’s around here someplace.” After a time, his boot broke through, revealing a vertical chimney as straight as a small highway culvert set on end.

      It was deep but narrow. Pete’s legs, cocked to the shape of Buddy’s elbow, were going to make him half again too wide. Buddy pressed down hard on the knees, trying to force them straight. But the combination of freezing and rigor kept bouncing them back. Finally, Buddy pulled off a glove and reached into his overalls. “Haul one a them legs up here.”

      I grabbed a heel and raised it, with difficulty, to my waist. Both legs came together, paired in a posture of obeisance. Buddy blew into his fingers, unfolded his knife. He forced the blade under the cuff of Pete’s frozen jeans and started cutting. One hard cut up, then another, then he was sawing freely through the wrinkles.

      Above all other things, Buddy was a pragmatist. He knew how to keep calm during a crisis. When the grease popped hot across the pan (his own words), he prided himself on approaching the world with the coldest kind of eye.

      Now he folded the fabric back to expose Pete’s hairy shin and calf. The skin gray, freezing. When he pressed his blade to the soft patch of flesh below the kneecap, that place where a doctor tests the reflexes, the skin split into a narrow, bloodless mouth.

      I could see that Buddy had expected this to be a good start, for the skin to pull loose as it did with elk and deer. But human skin, it seems, holds to a tighter standard. He worked his knife hard around the knee, grunting. “Damn if old Pete ain’t about as hard to skin as some old beaver. Beavers, now, there’s some tough skinning.”

      Eventually, the blade cracked hard into the joint, popping between cartilage and bone. Buddy worked at it until the leg wobbled loose in СКАЧАТЬ