Page 13 of Blazing Hot Nights
“I’m pretty sure someone else is already riding that,” he muttered.
“What was that?” I asked, leaning on my pitchfork while I stared down my oldest friend. The only friend who had stuck by me since the third grade. The only one I could count on through everything. I knew that without Beau, Bison Ridge would cease to exist, which was easy to remember when he wasn’t provoking me about Heaven.
“Nothing,” he said, kicking at the pellets until they were in a pile. “Nothing but the fact that you’ve been stomping around here for two days. And Tex reports the same is occurring in his camp. I thought you went there to mend bridges, not burn them.”
While his words were meant to tick me off, they did the opposite, and I sank onto a hay bale. “Heaven is stubborn as hell. You know that. I thought things were going fine, then she up and kicked me out.”
Beau held up his finger. “And do you happen to recall what you might’ve said right before she ‘up and kicked you out’?” He used air quotes to throw my words back at me like the annoying women at the café in town.
I made sure to stare off over his shoulder. If he looked in my eyes, he’d know the truth. “That’s beside the point, Beau.”
He groaned and pitched another load of hay into the stall. “You lie like a tombstone, son.”
I stood and started in on my work again, the scene in Heaven’s kitchen weighing heavily on my mind. Those eyes of hers were always my undoing: First, the fear in them when she’d crumbled to the ground in gut-wrenching pain. I would have given up my own life right there so she didn’t have to suffer. Then, when I’d lessened that pain a little bit with my hands to offer her relief, and they melted like the lake in the spring. Finally, the way they flared into a midnight blue when my question boiled her blood.
“Is it so wrong to want to know why she ditched me when I needed her?” I finally asked. “I wasn’t asking to be a knob head. I asked because I’m desperate to know why.”
His arms stopped midmotion, and his nostrils flared. “Cripes, if brains were leather, you couldn’t saddle a flea.”
“You got something to say?”
“I just did.”
Beau Hanson was the reason my head hurt all day every day. Correction, my head hurt all day every day because of BeauandHeaven Lane. Between the two of them, someone was always giving me a headache. A thought struck me. “You thinking about deserting camp to work for Heavenly Lane? Is that what I’m hearing?”
Beau stood slowly until his spine was ramrod straight. “I don’t hang my wash on someone else’s line. How you got that I’m leaving your sorry abusive ass because I called you stupid, I’ll never know. You might do well to remember a guilty fox hunts his own hole.”
He tossed his pitchfork into the hay and strode away, his boots rapping on the concrete barn floor. He smacked the barn door with the palm of his hand and, without turning, raised his middle finger at me before he disappeared from my sight.
The toe of my boot connected with the stall door and clattered the metal latch. What the hell was wrong with him?
Better question is, what the hell is wrong with you?
My toe connected with the stall again. Was it so wrong to want to know why Heaven left me in a lurch after I lost my wife? Was it wrong to hear what she was thinking when she decided to stop showing up to work without notice? If anyone should be angry, it should’ve been Beau. He’d had to pick up her slack until I could hire someone, and that wasn’t an easy endeavor in this godforsaken place.
“And another thing!”
I whipped around, and Beau was in the doorway of the barn. His hands were in fists at his side, and his breathing was heavy.
“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!” he bellowed.
“Good God almighty with those sayings already!” I yelled at his retreating back. I couldn’t help but laugh when I was rewarded with another middle finger. You could rile that boy up faster than a hornet’s nest.
The scene at Heaven’s ran through my mind again, followed by a replay of the conversation I’d had with my father earlier that morning. I needed something from Heaven, and thus far, vinegar wasn’t helping me get it.
Beau was onto something. You do catch more flies with honey.
***
The Wise Anchor Bar and Dancehall had been busier than usual on a Thursday night, but it was the middle of June, haying was over for a few weeks, and it was a top ten day in this part of the state. Everyone wanted to get out and sow their oats a bit before work picked up again.
The old bar sat on the edge of the town of Wellspring, overlooking the jack pine forest. It had been a town landmark for over fifty years. Originally a dairy barn, the owners decided milk wasn’t paying the bills, so they converted it into a bar and dancehall. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, the barn was always busy with special events, dances, wedding receptions, and hopeful country artists looking to make it big. It was also the only place open within thirty miles where you could get a decent burger and a beer after you finished in the fields at ten p.m.
My unpopular opinion that the bar was too loud and too cramped to be enjoyable was always met with haughty anger by the locals. I would much rather be at Heavenly Lane next to a campfire any day of the week.
Which was exactly where I sat.
I poked at the fire with a stick, leaning back carefully in my lawn chair and staring into the flames. Dawn hadn’t been the least bit surprised when I’d told her I was leaving, a short ten minutes after we had arrived. She made me take the truck home, promising she’d get a ride home with someone else. I suspected that someone else would be one Beauregard Hanson, but I wasn’t dumb enough to suggest it. She tended to stomp around in a huff whenever I mentioned him, as though I’d suggested she date Jeffrey Dahmer.
