Rudy from tribe by The Flying Johnsons

Rudy Bunyan, put on the second of his two jackets, one on top of the other, because even though it was still late summer, the mornings in central Idaho were already chilled and almost frosty. Then, he went to his father’s bookshelf and, quietly so to not wake him, selected a book to burn.
Passing over the, Naked Communist, one he thought might have some juicy scenes in it, he selected more or less at random and eventually chose, Ride The Dark Trail. Then, holding the knob turned so it didn’t click, he slipped out the door. Rudy made fresh tracks in the dust that paved the worn trail up to the small barn behind the horse stall.
The horse stall had no horse as the chicken coop held no chickens and the hog shed held no hogs. In fact, the only living animals behind the pealing house were Pygmy Shrews buried deep in tunnels below ground.
Each morning, Rudy chose a book to burn. It was an act of purging or cleaning. His father kept them, shelved them, but he had never seen him read one. In fact, Rudy had never seen his father look toward the shelf that held them. His father rarely looked at Rudy.

His father knew when the whisky was running low, he noticed when the cigarettes were almost gone, but he never noticed the books gone missing. Rudy didn’t read. These books especially, not yet. Rudy loved books because books burned so well. And so, with the paperback tucked under his arm he approached the backside of the furthest barn from the house.
“Which one is that?” asked the young girl waiting behind the barn. Jezel Grace, was her name. Her mother only knew stripper’s names when she was born. Her mother also slept late. Grace stood near the blackened feed bucket waiting Rudy’s arrival. Grace was her name, but they called her Brace for the metal contraption attached to her right leg that kept one foot screwed to the ground and made a squeaky spring each step she took. It was supposed to make her leg longer eventually and let people know from a distance she was different, weird and don’t ask her to run. So Grace the beautiful name of angels had become Brace, the earth bound.
“What’s on the front?”

“I don’ know.” There’s cowboys around a fire on the back, and a cowboy on a horse on the front. He’s got a lot of these.” Rudy held up one of the collected Louis L’amours and tore out the first five pages. “they burn good though”. The metal feed basket was already half full of charred pulp, few pages were only browned, the type could still be read in part if anyone would have wanted to.
“Do you think he’ll start noticing them missing?” Brace asked Rudy.
“No. There’s a lot there.”
Brace pulled a crumpled half pack of Seven-Eleven matches from her jacket pocket.

The barn, ringed in dead trees, had been baked in the years of dry summers and collapsed a little more each winter. Idaho had preserved and sprayed its treasures in heat. Idaho was a state as in love with its myth as much as its truth. But the tourists tended to visit the surrounding states Wyoming, Utah, Washington. When the country thought of cowboys they didn’t think of Idaho. Its history was as distant as fiction.

The pages caught fire easily as they always did at first ringing the edges with bite marks then spreading through sentences and chapters in a joyous dance, a hedonistic ballet of curling pulp and weightless black feathers. The two arsonists stepped back from the heat toeing the line of heat to the chill still in the morning air.

Then, Grace stumbled, the spring retreated on her leg and she fell into the burning feedbag of fiery pages. Rudy grabbed at her, catching her coat and pulling her back. But the bucket tipped, and the red pages fresh with fire poofed into the tumbleweeds snagging on the tiny thorns until the bush exploded. The barn sucked in the flames, inhaled the fire as it had been waiting for this moment a hundred years. Flame swarmed through each crack between the dried timber and the fire pierced the dark interiors. Cheatgrass grabbed at the flame. Each blade, a tiny torch flared and passed to the next, spreading up the hillside, toward substantial trees. Everything seemed to feed on the fire. Hungry voracious eaters of flame and suicide. Rudy and grace abandoned the attempt to put it out. The two ran and squeak-clacked down the hillside, passed the shed and barns the empty chicken coop and the house where is father slept in drunken haze of alcohol and ephedrine. On along the empty streets to Grace’s grandmother’s house where they crept in with barely a sound and went downstairs to the darkened rumpus room. Grace pulled out some Barbies, skinny blond dolls with long perfect legs and they pretended to take a vacation in the doll’s colorful plastic camper.

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