Bonegrinder Read Free

room containing the three eight-by-eight cells, most often empty.
    Wintone ran the back of his wrist across his forehead and slumped in the swivel chair behind his paper-strewn desk. The office was the coolest room right now, but if Wintone decided to spend the night here he’d set up a small fan to blow the coolness from the air conditioner into the back room. It worked. Cool air pretty much went where it was pushed, and where it was pushed was cooler than the small set of rooms Wintone leased from the Lalprin family, who had left the rest of the house empty two years ago to move to Springfield.
    Etty regarded Wintone from her portrait on his desk corner, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her mid-thirties, with beauty but no hint of mystery in her slight smile. The smile was simply something that belonged about the generous lips; the thing about Etty that stayed strongest with Win-tone was the smile.
    Wintone leaned back in the wood swivel chair, a big man, nearly big enough to be called huge, with a barrel chest, oak-trunk thighs and large hands that were surprisingly quick and dexterous. He had angular, fine-chiseled, almost haughty features and a boyish thatch of curly, brown, unruly hair that looked too innocent for the face below. When he moved, it was with a lightness and balance and a deceptively lazy cast to his eyes. With a certain sadness, he knew from occasional shortnesses of breath, from lapses of reflex and aches in the mornings that he wasn’t near the man he’d been at thirty-five. He was a man beginning to feel the burden of time.
    That was what made the thing about Etty all the more persistent. If only they’d had some few years together instead of the few months…. He remembered Etty’s father, Henry Card, a hard Baptist rock of a man, and his endless biblical philosophizing after the accident.
    Wintone tilted back his head and stared up at the finely cracked ceiling. “The Lord taketh away.” The Lord had taken Etty and her softness from Wintone, taken what had given a joyous pattern to his life, taken the only future that meant anything. On Route 44 the Lord had been an over-the-road tractor-trailer with diesel stacks; on Route 44 the Lord had slammed down His fist like a sledgehammer. On Etty, not Wintone.
    As in a relentless TV news film he was forced to watch, Wintone again saw the flames, again heard the screams that had meant so little to him at the time as he stumbled about the highway shoulder. An intersection collision, impossible to say whose fault. A hand, an arm, supporting him; Malloby, a state trooper he vaguely knew; Malloby staring hard into his face. “Listen, Billy, I ain’t gonna ask you …” And Wintone had been drinking before the accident; Wintone and nobody else knew that for a provable fact, and nobody including Wintone knew if he’d been drunk enough for it to affect his driving. He had nodded numbly, hadn’t had to take the inhalator test to determine if he was legally drunk, legally and morally responsible for Etty’s death. “Jesus …” the dazed truck driver had repeated over and over, “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …” And a county sheriff hadn’t had to take the test that any other driver would have been required to take, that would have fixed responsibility or innocence; and Wintone wished to Jesus now that he had taken the test, wished now that he could know one way or the other, so eventually he might forget.
    Wintone hadn’t seen or talked to his father-in-law since the funeral.
    The swivel chair squealed as the sheriff dropped his weight forward, rested his elbows on the scarred desk top. What he’d had the crazy urge to do after the funeral was to take his shotgun, knife and fishing gear and disappear into the deep woods along Big Water Lake, simply disappear, from himself, from everyone. There were dark places there, shady and cool, where nothing in this world could find him. But he hadn’t done that; he wasn’t a man to surrender to senseless