He sat back in the rubble with his bad leg out and studied the ID. Pretty girl. Pretty smile. Her image unchanged all these seasons while the source of that image inches away grew old and unrecognizable, a lonesome desiccated remainder of herself, of family and of love and pride and delight and hope. He looked out over the valley. A bird flared at eye level and screamed at him and flapped away. Perhaps it lived here on this ledge, high sepulchral roost, watching over her. Keeping her company until her people could find her and claim her and carry her back down the mountain, as if in victory.

“Sean,” his father called. “Sean.”

He turned and looked up and waved the ID. He called up what he’d found and from where he sat on the ledge he felt the heart swing back into his father like a stone pendulum, flesh once more and filling with blood again and going on with its work.

One of the deputies had gone back down the trail for the towrope, and while he waited the boy sat beside the girl, facing where she faced. Trying to see what she’d been seeing all this time.

49

The boy went to bed and Grant lay down on the sofa and remained there in the fitful light of the TV, watching the webbing up in the vigas, the dusty swags pulsing with color. Voices from the TV reached him in strange incantation, voices undertowed into dream and his dreams playing on before his open eyes, all of it vivid and repeating until at last the hours delivered the new day, its gray light in the windows, and still in this fevered state he sat up, hunched and exhausted. On the screen a woman stood at a rostrum in a purple robe, small black ball of microphone near her mouth. She spread her arms wide and he raised the remote and the screen went black.

The air outside chilled his sweat, his clammy, clinging shirt. Porch floorboards popped under his weight and he felt the burning cold of them through his socks. He inhaled too deeply and the air came retching back up and he stood gripping the post, convulsed less by the hacking than by the effort to stop it—until the cigarette was lit and he drew the calming smoke into his lungs.

Before him, across the clearing, the house was taking shape in the dawn. No movement and no sound anywhere but the first tentative notes of the birds.

He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the railing and went back inside and got into a dry shirt, and then he returned to the kitchen and set the coffee to brewing and stood at the window looking at the old man’s house, the light already changed. He poured coffee into a mug and left the mug sitting there. Across the way the windows were dark, upstairs and down. The rockers on the porch stilled and empty.

He looked at his watch, then drew his fingertips slowly over his jaw, as if he were deciding whether or not to shave. He stood that way for a long time. Then he pulled on his boots and got into his jacket and stepped once more into the cold morning. Down the cold popping steps and the pops returning to him in echo off the face of the old man’s house.

He wasn’t in the kitchen and there was no sound of the TV in the living room but Grant looked there anyway. No sound in the house at all but the tocking of the grandfather clock, and after he’d checked every place a man could be downstairs, he climbed the stairs heavily and he knocked and stood a moment with his hand on the knob, then opened the old man’s door and looked in and there was no need to say his name but he said it just the same.

“Em,” he said.

Silent and still in the big bed where he’d slept with his wife so many years. Silent and still and gray and so small in the big bed and all the heat gone out of the bed and out the body, and all the history and all the love gone out of it too.

Part IV

50

Billy Kinney lay against the headboard with the bunched pillow under his neck, watching the smoke in the middle space above him. It was so quiet he could hear the burning of the tobacco each time he inhaled. He lay very still, listening, and after a while he realized it was the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs: sometime in the night it had wound down and ceased its ancient tock tock tock. He had seen the waxen and painted face, had heard the old pastor’s entreaties to God, the platitudes of the

condolent—but it was this, finally, the abandonment of habit, of sound, of time itself, that made it true and real.

Downstairs next to a half pot of coffee was a hundred-dollar bill and a message. This money is from me, not the estate. I’ll be back in a few days with the auction people.

“Good morning to you too, brother,” he said, his voice strange to himself.

No more sheriff now so no more neighbors bearing casseroles and pies. No more hard heels rapping the porch at dawn and the sheriff thanking them for the food and for the sympathies and seeing them off with no further awkwardness, for they’d come early and wished to leave early, before the other one came down, and wasn’t it just remarkable they asked each other as they drove away how two boys from such two good souls could grow up such entirely different kinds of boys? One of the mysteries of the Lord, they allowed, and always would be, but today our prayers are with them both.

He uncapped his lighter and held it to a corner of the note and watched the flames climb, the paper twisting and blackening until the ink purpled and rose again in a phantom script, the flame going at his fingers before he dropped it into the sink. He lit a cigarette and thought of Denise Gatskill in her black funeral dress. Hair done up and showing her neck. She had come by the house but he’d sent her away. Now he had money and he ought to take her down to the city, to a bar where they served the red wine she liked.

He stood before the window. Nothing moving out in the gray midday world. Not a bird in the sky and nothing stirring over at the old ranch house either. The blue Chevy gone and those two likely gone off with the sheriff for some brunch or to the diner on their own. Monday, Monday. He began to whistle but abruptly stopped and looked quickly over his shoulder—at what? Nothing. The empty kitchen. The view into the empty living room. Dark blank face of the TV. Nothing.

He grabbed his jacket from the chairback and frisked it for phone and wallet and keys and slapped up the hundred-dollar bill, and then he went out onto the porch and past the wooden rockers and down the steps and across the yellow and crusted and spongy turf. Rich stink of earth in the air, pungency of rootbeds and tunneling worms. Grass and hay and horseshit.

He drove by the cafe and he saw the blue Chevy there and drove on. He drove by the Gatskill house and he drove by his old high school up on the yellow and snow-scabbed hill, and everything he saw was old and tired and pitiful. It was as though he’d gone away for many years and had not seen the process that changed things but only the change itself, all at once, which was the same as seeing your own life gone by. Then he reached the interstate, and with the speakers pumping through him he gunned the El Camino and headed down toward Denver.

HE LEFT THE CLOUDS and the dregs of snow and descended into the full green outbreak of spring. There were good cheap places on the east side of the city but there was a place he liked on the west side with a billiards table and where you could still smoke and where if you got too lit you didn’t have to drive all the way back through town, through all that traffic and highway patrol. He also hoped to see an old boy he knew there, although this old boy wouldn’t show until much later if he showed at all.