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He listens to the buzz on the line, the patter of the receptionist's fingers on her keyboard.
"There is no Mr. Reilly," she says.
McEban spells out the name. First name and last. "He's a real-estate broker," he says. "He's there for a convention. You have a convention of real-estate brokers, don't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Would you have another look?"
"There's nothing under Reilly."
He thumbs his sandwich open and pats it shut. "Try Alan Patrick," he says.
"Patrick?"
"They work together. Alan drove them over."
"There's a Mr. Patrick," she tells him. "I'll put you through."
He listens to the phone ring and looks at the wall clock, and it reads 6:12, and Bennett comes on the line after four rings and coughs and sucks at a noseful of snot and says, "Excuse me," and blows his nose, and then, "Hello," and then again, "Hello."
McEban listens to each word and after a pause realizes he's holding his breath.
"You're a prick, whoever you are," Bennett says, and the line goes dead, and McEban stands and hangs up the receiver and leans against the wall and stares into the grayed mesh of the screen.
When the dog whines he steps through the mudroom, swings the door open, hears it slap at his back. He stands unsteadily in the yard.
A gust of water-cooled breeze bursts up from the stockpond, and he leans forward and rests his palms against his thighs and inhales deeply through his nose. His gut fills and paunches with the damp morning air. He exhales the breath in a guttural cough, snapping his belly up tight. Air in, air out. Ten rounds of breath and he has completed nine months, and now one day, of this ritual huffing. Nine months and two days without a cigarette. He straightens, breathes evenly, totters forward a step. His eyes water. His skull feels brittle, nearly weightless.
Woody strikes out across the drive, snuffling in arcs, and McEban follows. They work through the yarrow, paintbrush, and sage and top a low rise opposite the house. The sun is hard and new. It deepens the red in the iron soil under their feet.
It is on this hill, in this red soil, that the bones of his family lie: the bodies of his father, his brother, his grandmother and his grandfather. He looks down at his hands. He flexes his hands. He thinks of his family's hands. He's been told he has his father's hands. The hands of Jock McEban. He sees his father standing behind those hands. A big man, sledge-muscled, blond and watery-eyed. A man of duty. A man who put his shoulder against the life God gave him and went to work. A man who should not have looked up from his work.
McEban turns and sits back against his father's marker and stretches his legs out straight. He flicks a woodtick from his thigh. He raises his hands before his face. The hands are long-fingered, thick, yellowed in callus, cracked, and now sunstruck. Hands meant for the land, he thinks, for animals. A waste on women, no doubt, short or tall.
He drops his right hand to the smallest stone marker. He traces the name chiseled there. He doesn't have to look. Bailey McEban is the name his fingers read. He closes his eyes and searches for some memory of his brother. His twin. They must have looked alike, but there are no photographs, and now he is all that's left. He thinks of Bailey; of the infant boy found dead at just fourteen months. He wonders if he was there, in the crib beside his brother, perhaps asleep when the body was found. He has never thought to ask.
He wonders about his brother's voice. He cocks his head. He listens. He believes his brother has told him something he cannot remember. He pictures Bailey's round mouth forming its first soft words. Perhaps his brother's ghost means to say it again, he thinks. Aloud. He listens harder.
The Bighorns rise beyond the ranch to the west. Their palisades of limestone and granite shimmer, opalescent in the dawn, reflective as thousand-foot stands of pearled glare. The mountains entire--rolling north and south--shouldered into patches of apple-jade meadow, their expanse come morning-bright, descending in waves of green pine, green fir, green aspen, gone to tar and emerald in the deep collapse of their separate drainages. Owl Creek to the south. Trail Creek farther south. Cabin Creek just north. And behind the ranch, the north and south forks of Horse Creek.
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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