Free Burning Bright: Stories by Ron Rash Page B

his father.
    His father studied it a few moments, then broke into a wide grin.
    “This watch is a Rolex,” his father said.
    “Thank you, Jared,” his mother said, looking as if she might cry. “You’re the best son anybody could have, ain’t he, Daddy?”
    “The very best,” his father said.
    “How much can we get for it?” his mother asked
    “I bet a couple of hundred at least,” his father answered.
    His father clamped the watch onto his wrist and got up. Jared’s mother rose as well.
    “I’m going with you. I need something quick as I can get it.” She turned to Jared. “You stay here, honey. We’ll be back in just a little while. We’ll bring youback a hamburger and a Co-Cola, some more of that cereal too.”
    Jared watched as they drove down the road. When the truck had vanished, he sat down on the couch and rested a few minutes. He hadn’t taken his coat off. He checked to make sure the fire was out and then went to his room and emptied his backpack of school books. He went out to the shed and picked up a wrench and a hammer and placed them in the backpack. The flurries were thicker now, already beginning to fill in his tracks. He crossed over Sawmill Ridge, the tools clanking in his backpack. More weight to carry, he thought, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry them back.
    When he got to the plane, he didn’t open the door, not at first. Instead, he took the tools from the backpack and laid them before him. He studied the plane’s crushed nose and propeller, the broken right wing. The wrench was best to tighten the propeller, he decided. He’d straighten out the wing with the hammer.
    As he switched tools and moved around the plane, the snow fell harder. Jared looked behind him and on up the ridge and saw his footprints were growing fainter. He chipped the snow and ice off the windshields with the hammer’s claw. Finished, he said, and dropped the hammer on the ground. He opened the passenger door and got in.
    “I fixed it so it’ll fly now,” he told the man.
    He sat in the backseat and waited. The work and walk had warmed him but he quickly grew cold. He watched the snow cover the plane’s front window with a darkening whiteness. After a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold. Jared looked out the side window and saw the whiteness was not only in front of him but below. He knew then that they had taken off and risen so high that they were enveloped inside a cloud, but still he looked down, waiting for the clouds to clear so he might look for the pickup as it followed the winding road toward Bryson City.

THE WOMAN WHO BELIEVED IN JAGUARS
    O n the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Lealand thinks of jaguars.
    She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements—like muscled water—as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina text-books. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of theboys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.
    But now as she drives west toward Columbia, Ruth again sees the jaguar and the palmetto trees it walks through. She wonders why in the intervening decades she has never read or heard anyone else mention that jaguars once roamed South Carolina. Windows up, radio off, Ruth travels in silence. The last few days were made more wearying because she’s had to converse with so many people. She is an