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His grandmother smiled and then began to chuckle. The sleeves of her housecoat were pushed past her elbows. Her forearms and hands were shiny with dishwater. Her cheeks were flushed.
"That suit's going to fit you someday, too," she said.
McEban's bad foot throbs and his gut rumbles, and he thinks he might suffer the shits. He feels hungry, but not ready for his breakfast.
He bends at the kitchen sink and sucks water from his cupped hands and straightens and stretches both arms above his head. The water runs back along his forearms, and there is the soft staccato pop of the cartilage in his shoulders and lower back. His shirt hangs open, unsnapped, and he grips at the slight roll of fat that rides over a kidney, and fingers the glazed line of scar tissue that loops high across the hip.
He works his thumb against the fingerpads of a hand and counts. Eight broken ribs. A split pelvis, twice. Both knees shot. Five teeth knocked out. A broken collarbone. Right wrist. Left arm. An ankle. A clubbed foot. He doesn't count the stitches. He knows he's taken enough stitches to make a quilt.
He tries to remember any single horse wreck, and only one comes clear. He can recall a tractor wreck, and a goring. He remembers the half-blind bull that got him down in the loading ramp, and he remembers that his father turned the bull into hamburger. The revenge of carnivores, he thinks.
He runs his tongue against the capped teeth at the front of his mouth and thinks about replacement parts. "Jesus Christ," he says aloud. He looks down at the dog. "It's no goddamn wonder I live alone. I'm either working or in intensive care."
He turns on the radio over the sink and leans into the counter and listens to the ag report, and then the local birthday and anniversary club, and when he turns the radio off imagines he hears footsteps in the hallway. He looks into it and there is no one, and he knows that he wants someone there. Or on the porch. Flushing a toilet. Coughing. An old woman would do, he thinks. A boy would do nicely. He thinks of the sound of a boy in the house, and he thinks of the half-dozen women he's dated in the last twenty years. He thinks that none of them was Gretchen.
He pictures the women standing together, grouped for a photograph. Phyllis, Gwen, and Rachel he puts to the front. They are short, stout women, their hips and thighs stuccoed with cellulite. Arlene, Dolly, and Joyce stand behind them. Thinner, quick-tempered. Arlene has pale, thyroid-enlarged eyes. All six present themselves hunched, their shoulders dropped down and over their breasts. "Heart-shrunken," he says aloud, but thinks they could have given him children. Any one of them. He looks down at Woody. "What about that?" he asks, and the dog cocks his head. "We're probably both too old to start now," he says, but knows he is only making conversation with a neutered dog.
He spreads honey and peanut butter on separate slices of white bread and presses them into a sandwich. He carries the sandwich to the mudroom and sits on a plank bench. He bites into the bread to free his hands and pulls on a pair of calf-high irrigation boots over his leather workboots. He stares out at the brown and overgrown square of front yard and reminds himself, as he does each morning, to buy a length of garden hose and a sprinkler when he's next in town. He stands and lets Woody out through the screen and steps back into the kitchen and takes the receiver from the wallphone. He dials Wyoming Information.
When the operator comes on he asks for the number of the Holiday Inn in Cody, and while the number is ringing he sits at the kitchen table.
"Holiday Inn," a voice answers. It is a young woman's voice.
"Bennett Reilly," he says, but he can hardly hear himself say the name.
"Excuse me, sir?"
He clears his throat. He lays his breakfast sandwich on the table. "Mr. Bennett Reilly," he repeats. Louder this time.
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Spragg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Putnam.
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