In Western Counties by Nickolas Butler Page B

ignoring the moths powdering his face. She answered the door with a shotgun. He told her that he was her nephew, from Butte, Montana, come with money to buy the family farm. He waved a wad of paper in the air, two fifties on the outsides and nothing in between but thin cardboard coupons for car washes. She looked at him warily, rubbed her forehead as if to loosen out a memory. She undid the lock, lowered the weapon, let him in.
    He had watched her for a few weeks from the road with a pair of binoculars. Knew that she rarely left the house and that she lived alone. Knew she was frail. He’d gleaned too that she was senile: She talked to herself incessantly and he had seen her feeding invisible chickens, broadcasting seeds from her hands to nothing but the sparse grass and gravel of her yard. In other cities he had lived in trailer courts or apartment buildings, but inevitably his neighbors complained about the dogs. Their barking, their waste, their potential for violence. He knew he needed privacy and space. The widow’s name was Ione Miller. He knew this from stealing her mail.
    She served him stale cookies and reheated coffee. He pretended to eat, spit the cookies into a napkin, wiped off his tongue. At the kitchen table he let her talk for two hours, the darkness of the house closing in around them. Then he produced a document that he had her sign, his hand on her frail wrist. She fell asleep in the chair later and he carried her up a flight of stairs to her bed. She weighed next to nothing. When he held a pillow over her face, she did not struggle, her hands swatting weakly at his wrists, as if shooing flies. He pressed his ear to her chest and held a mirror before her thin lips, terrified of her bony fingers reanimating.
    And then he went outside to his truck, where he let the three dogs out, kissing at them and clapping his hands. They wagged their tails in the darkness and urinated. He reached into the truck and illuminated the headlights. They shone out onto the prairie, its grasses bending with the evening wind. In the distance, one giant oak. He set off across the field, the dogs at his heels. He collected fallen limbs until dawn, stacking the wood behind the house. In the barn he found kerosene and some rotten lumber, which he also assembled behind the house. Exhausted, he went back inside the house, wrapped the old woman in her bedsheets, carried her out to the barn, and then returned to her bedroom, where he fell into her ancient mattress and went instantly to sleep, boots still on, and the dogs staring at him from the floor, where they curled in on themselves, their eyes soft and wet. In the mattress he felt the depressions of where she had slept for so many years, her ghost in bed with him. He considered burning the thing, but did not want to leave behind its ancient metal coils. He would buy a new one. The mattress was loud and lumpy, but he dozed heavily.
    The next evening he lighted a huge pyre behind the house on the margins of the prairie. He watched the flames envelope the figure in bedsheets and then returned to the house, where he looked for a television for over an hour before turning on an old record player, the volume of which filled the house and set the dogs to barking. He quickly threw the machine out onto the lawn before retiring to the bedroom, where he pulled the mattress onto the floor. He lay down and the dogs nestled their bodies against his, warming his thighs and belly. Every time he rolled over, the mattress made a sound like dry leaves. He stripped the mattress of its stale sheets, wrapping them around him, and then he fit the mattress into the old woman’s closet, shutting the folding doors, the mattress still alive sounding, everywhere the noise of dry papers being rattled. He went back to the dogs on the floor and fell asleep, the flames of the pyre burning wide and high into the night. It would be impossible for anyone to see the black smoke.
    In the morning, a pile of hot