From the Fire IV Read Free Page B

you do with him?”
    “ Do with him?  Nothing, that’s just it.  He was too much
like daddy, underneath it all in secret.  I realized it, so I ran.  That was
the end of my life in Boulder, but not the end.  I commuted to classes a
bit yet, hiding from … from my ex-fiancé all the while.  Crept about campus
after I’d told him I’d be gone.  It was terrible, he kept trying to find me.”
    “Oh, you didn’t.”
    “Oh, I did.  I even grasped at one last very unenthusiastically
proffered lifeline, from my very disappointed father, and I became an
anthropologist, in time.”
    Silas frowned, misunderstood.  “No, not that part.”
    “Not what?”  Sophie uncrossed her legs.
    “Tell me what you guys did , I mean not anything , but
…” said Silas.  His lips quirked a little.  “Woah-damn.  Listen to me, how rude
was that?”  Then, over a frown:  “But what about that poor guy?  Barefoot Not-Tom,
what you do to get rid of him ?”
    “Why, I introduced him to my worst enemy,” said Sophie.  “Clarice
Carpenter.  Sweet, beautiful young thing.  Exquisite teeth.  Like a horse. 
They were married thirteen years, last I checked.”
    “Oh, damn!  Horsie hot girl in the end?  That’s just mean.  Ain’t no messing with you now, is there?  Barefoot Not-Tom and a thirteen-year sentence
without parole to boot?  That poor damn girl got hammered .  Teach a man
to follow you around.”
    Sophie giggled.  Silas cackled, and instantly regretted it.  He
tried to clutch his ribs.
    She was off the bed at once.  She knelt before him, one hand upon
his sweat-beaded brow and the other going to the medical kit under the cot’s
metal foreleg.  She felt around for the capped and hidden morphine needle by
touch.  “Hold still.”
    “I’m holding.”  He flinched, expecting a needle at any moment.
    “Hold more still.”
    “Like this?”
    “Like you can’t talk,” said Sophie.
    “Right.”
    “Shhh.”
    Looking sidelong but not moving, he gave her a pained and
well-studied expression, one which Sophie was quite certain had been formerly
tendered solely for his wife.  He spoke through gritted teeth:  “Well, can I look at what you trying to do?”
    “Well sure you can, if you quiet,” said Sophie, in her best
white-girl-Creole lilt and drawl.  “Woah-damn.”
    And Silas tried very hard not to laugh again.  He failed, yet the
needle found its mark.
    * * * * *
    As the morphine took hold and Silas was fading back, down, into
its icy fingers, they talked and smiled for a little while more.
    “I didn’t mean for him to die,” said Sophie.  They both knew who
she was speaking of.  “He was a dear friend.”
    “S’all … it’s all right,” said Silas.  His voice was beginning to
slur, a pooling rumble, seeking the edges of a deeper brook flowing down inside
of him.  “I understand, I’m sure that he did too.  He was retired sheriff.  Trying
to help people, making choices led him into bad.  Not your fault.  You good
people, Sophie.”
    She touched his hand, a brief interlacing of fingers.  “I can’t
talk about that anymore.”
    He seemed to understand.
    “Well, let’s talk about something else, then.  Painful is fine,
I’m losin’ …”  He did not manage to finish his sentence, and then he looked
confused.  He focused on her, as if he believed she had asked a question he had
not heard.
    “What do you want to talk about?” she asked.
    “Hmm?”  His eyes rolled.  Soon, she would need to let him sleep.
    And what of tonight, Sophie?  What if he dies?  Will you go mad at
last, if after all of his suffering, this miracle of his arrival, you find him
dead there lying beside you?  What if you wake alone?
    “We’ll talk about whatever you like.  Not the bodies, or the
shaft,” she said.  “Don’t tell me any of that.”  That seemed to bring him
back.  He blinked, trying to focus on the unlit bank of lights above the
honeycombed slopes of