Page 48 of Into the Fire

I tilted my head.

“We can finish this there.”

It was an invitation. To what, I wasn’t sure. Still, I was dying of curiosity to see his place.

“Okay,” I said.

***

I followed his truck up the county road and onto a gravel spur. The house sat back against the timber, with wood stacked like a man expecting a hard winter or three.

He took his boots off on the screened porch, so I did the same. He dropped his keys in a chipped enamel dish by the door.

The first glance was what I’d expected. Clean. Spare. One skillet was drying in a rack with a mug beside it. A McMurtry paperback lay open face down on the arm of an Arts and Crafts chair.

“You can say it,” Boone said.

“Are you sure?”

“You’re dying to say it.”

“It looks like the bunkhouse passed inspection and got promoted.”

He smirked and headed for the kitchen. I made a slow circuit of the front room and saw the poster.

An old framed Joy Division poster hung beside the bookcase, black and white, a figure stretched across a stone floor with its head thrown back and one arm flung out. JOY DIVISION across the top. LOVE WILL TEAR US APART across the bottom.

“Boone.”

“What.”

“Joy Division but not New Order?”

“It’s what might have been.”

I looked at the poster, then toward the kitchen at him. Everything else in the house matched. The poster matched nothing.

“How long have you had this?”

“Since I was nineteen.”

Seventeen years ago, some kid I couldn’t picture had hung that poster on his bedroom wall.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart,” I said. “That’s reassuring.”

“Don’t start.”

“Oh, I’ve already started. You hung it where you can see it from the kitchen.”

“It came with me. It goes where I go.”

I looked at it for another second. The frame was a quarter inch off level. In the house, where the boots stood paired at the door, it looked wrong.

I left it that way and decided to interfere with dinner.

Boone pulled two venison steaks from the fridge, thawed overnight. He had a large bowl of fresh tomatoes on the counter.

“Marty brought you those, didn’t he?”