Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

arms and it had made her think of a phoenix, the mythological bird that burns to ash and then rises from the flames. She hoped nothing evil would be reincarnated from these ashes.

She wouldn’t need her gum chain anymore. She threw it on top of the smoking robe, thinking of how many painful hours she had spent making it, days upon days, years upon years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

From a pay phone she made one more call to the archbishop’s office, the same one that had naively given her Father Monster’s address. She told the nasally voice to stay on the line, because she wanted him to hear the names of Father Lazaria’s victims, one by one, from his own Bible. It was a horrifically long list.

Minnie, Jasmine, Mary, Michael…

She heard the breathing on the other end of the phone grow distant and said if he stopped listening before she was finished, she would call the police.

And if the church let Father Lazaria near children again, she would do so much worse than that.

She read each name slowly and clearly, trying to give every person the dignity they deserved. She didn’t know all the names, but she recognized some of them, remembering what her mother had said about these things not happening in their world.

She stumbled only once, not on her own name, but on her brother’s: Silas.

Afterward she walked for about a mile away from town before sticking out her thumb, barely noticing the faint scent of smoke in the air.

BASKETBALL TOWN

The world is on fire. The summer of 1995 will go on record as the first summer in history that folks in Lared, Montana, finally have something besides basketball to talk about. The skies are clogged with smoke billowing in from Colorado and Wyoming, an apocalypse of ash and soot. It’s so dark, streetlights come on in the middle of the day. Weather advisories warn against exercising outside because of the inordinate amount of harmful particulates in the air. Nobody has taken a real breath in days, and everybody is cranky.

For Kelsey Randolph, not being able to play basketball ten hours a day on the outdoor court is basically the end of the world.

She pushes through the doors of the U-Pump-It, bracing for her usual reception from Jimmy Jeffs. But for the first time, JJ doesn’t notice her. Nobody notices her. A small group is clustered beneath a television set mounted over the candy aisle, watching the news.

“Goddamn lunatic,” JJ says, not taking his eyes off the screen.

Two men in funny tall hats are leading a confused-looking priest out of a rectory and into a waiting black car. The volume is too low to hear the reporter, but words scroll beneath the image: “Colorado Priest Accused of Accidentally Starting Blaze That Has Grown to Over Seven Thousand Acres.”

“Burned his robes up in a dumpster and started the wildfire,” Jimmy says. “Crazy as a loon.”

Kelsey feels an unexpected wave of sympathy for the priest, who looks shaken and disoriented. She doesn’t know anything about Catholics but figures the bigger the hat, the higher the rank. Those men on either side of him must be in charge.

Kelsey’s stranger gauge isn’t well honed. Having grown up in Lared, population 750, she finds that her default is usually to trust people, even if there is the odd Jimmy Jeffs to contend with.

“If that was anyone else, they’d be going to jail,” JJ says in the authoritative voice of someone who has been faced many times with the prospect of going to jail. “Now they’ll just take him to some comfy retirement home to live out his days.”

“He doesn’t look dangerous, just old,” Kelsey says, without thinking.

JJ turns to look at her.

“What do you know about dangerous? And how’s him setting fire to the world gonna help your jump shot?”

“I’m at pump three.” She waves a ten-dollar bill in his face.

“You know, if you’d just taken that shot from the top of the key, we would have won.”

She grabs a Snickers bar off the rack and stuffs it into her pocket as soon as he turns his back. (Everybody does it: payment for having to deal with JJ.) He’s oblivious to everything once he’s up on his soapbox, ranting about Kelsey’s jump shot or accusing her of not shooting enough. Or insisting that because of her, they’d lost a game last year for the first time since anyone can remember. One game. You’d think she’d killed someone and hidden the body, the way everyone was acting.

“I know you think it’s your job to feed your forwards, but guards also need to know when to take the shot.” He emphasizes every word with a finger punch to the register.

“Assists are nice, but nobody wins a game because they got one more assist than the other guy.”

After a long pause and a longer lingering glance at her boobs, he adds, “Or gal.”

He takes her money and waggles his tongue back and forth through the space where his front teeth should be.

Why, oh why, isn’t there another gas station in this town?

“Thanks, JJ.” She waves at him, using the Snickers bar as her middle finger. The bell ding-dongs overhead, and she pushes through the broken doors, crisscrossed with masking tape and cardboard, because why fix them? Jimmy Jeffs’s customers will just break them again; they’re dependable like that.

“Shoot the damn ball!” he shouts.

Inside her car, Kelsey turns on the wipers and watches a thin layer of ash swish across her windshield like gray snow. This summer is a disaster, and not just because of the fire.

She really misses her cousin Lillian, who has only sent two postcards and has not apologized for leaving without saying goodbye.

Lil loves Alaska, says it’s just like Montana but bigger in every way: bigger mountains, bigger skies, bigger belt buckles, as if that’s possible. She doesn’t know that fires have choked all the life out of the wide Montana sky; she’s too busy