Bone Fire Book

I can't believe it took me so long to get around to this book, as I'm a fan of Mark Spragg's work. I'm glad I waited, though, because today I'm in that state of bliss that comes from having been recently re-immersed in a world that I have some knowledge of but had to leave when I moved from Wyoming to Colorado. Spragg gets it right, as always.

Take the youngest character in this book, Kenneth. He is only ten, yet has totally absorbed the western values that shape the best men in that region. When his wacko, but charming, mom comes for one of her brief and unexpected visits, he keeps his level head. He knows she'll leave soon. This is not his preference, but just the way she is. Rather than spend the evening with her, he opts to let his father do that and chooses to go out and change the water in the flood irrigated fields. He says, "I should get used to changing the water by myself...So I know I can."

That awareness of how things are with loved ones and that practicality suffuses every character, yet each is also surprising and interesting--not really the kind of people you'd expect to find in Wyoming, but the kind of people you do find there: people who have read some, who think that Dick Cheney ought to have to see at least one of the boys destroyed in the Iraq war every day of his life, and who, instead of undermining one another, although they do plenty of that, do rise to the challenge, or try to, when things get really serious and rough for someone they love.

The book also challenges every notion you ever had about a western story. The sheriff, who we normally expect to triumph in the end and win the woman he loves, has a terminal illness. And he loves two women, one of them his first wife, and the other the widowed wife of a best friend. Spragg writes masterful dialogue. Here, for example, is the sheriff on a tryst with his ex-wife:

He opened and closed the barbed-wire gate behind them, idling out across a pasture of a dozen sections or more. They parked on a rise with a view across the foothills to the south, and up toward Montana in the other direction, sitting for a moment listening to the engine tick as it cooled.
"I'm not unhappy."
"I am," he said.
She looked at him. "Can we get out?"

They are talking about their current marriages. We know this, but not because we're told. There's a great deal of artistry in writing dialogue like this. It works because of the space around it, by which I mean the descriptive, physical space. We are there with them. It is quiet and the land is vast. Such places call for fewer, but well-chosen words.