ClarenceBN by Sarah M. Anderson

was also sitting at the fire.
    Nobody was the night janitor at the Clinic and he did a good job, but the man was little more than a vigilante with an underdeveloped moral compass. It wasn’t that the men who had the misfortune of meeting Nobody Bodine in the shadows of the night didn’t deserve what they got—they were often men who sold drugs or beat children or worse. Clarence would know—he’d sewn more than his share of bad men back together.  
    But Clarence was a Navy man. He liked his order and he liked his rules. Shipshape and Bristol fashion, as his old commander used to say. And Nobody didn’t follow either directive.
    “Hiya,” Rebel said as he added more wood to the fire.  
    “Hiya, Rebel. Nobody,” Clarence added, just to be polite. He didn’t often see Nobody—the man was a shadow. Even now, it was hard to resist taking a long look at the man some people believed was really a ghost.
    But when he focused on Nobody the shadows seemed to . . . bend toward him, like it was darker where he sat. He nodded at Clarence.
    Clarence sat on the far side of the fire from Nobody. No one spoke for a few minutes as Rebel got the fire blazing enough that it put out some actual heat.  
    Clarence knew he needed to get talking—he only had so much time before Dr. Mitchell got home—or, for that matter, Melinda Mitchell came looking for Nobody. Or worse, both sisters showed up together. Clarence wasn’t sure he could handle that level of feminine onslaught right now.
    But there was something about the flames that pulled him in. The fire wasn’t—well, it wasn’t like watching television. No shapes formed and acted out a scene from his past, present, or future. But there was something about the way the fire flickered back and forth that didn’t seem like a regular fire burning a regular log. That something made him think of his first year in the Navy, of being a young punk who was scared shitless by all that water but who was desperate to get off the rez and do something with his life.
    He didn’t know how long he sat there, watching the red dance with the orange, so when Rebel said, “I heard Ezra Johnson was back,” it made Clarence jump.
    He shook back to himself and whatever’d been in the flames seemed to go up in smoke. “Yeah. He showed up at the Clinic today.”
    Rebel chuckled. “And you threw him out just for that?”  
    He shouldn’t be surprised. This was not a matter of Rebel and his habit of having ‘visions.’ Everyone on this entire rez probably knew about the almost-fight today. “He said things he shouldn’t have said to Tammy and I wasn’t going to stand for it.”  
    Nobody snorted in appreciation of this, which did not make Clarence feel a hell of a lot better because picking Ezra up and giving him the old heave-ho was exactly the kind of thing Nobody would have done.
    Rebel grinned at the fire, as if the something that might or might not be there was clearer to him than it was to Clarence. “And that explains why you’re here, then? Not that it’s not great to see you and all.”
    Clarence sighed. “She told Ezra to come to dinner and me not to. She didn’t want me there.”
    “You did throw the man out,” Rebel pointed out.  
    “He deserved it. Left her high and dry for years and the first thing out of his mouth when he sees her isn’t an apology—it’s a crack about her body? No .” And just like that, Clarence wanted to throw that dickbag across the threshold all over again. He deserved that and more for what he’d done to Tammy.
    Which, to be honest, was the reason Clarence had been forcibly un-invited from dinner.  
    “And . . .” Rebel said, as if the all-seeing Rebel Runs Fast wasn’t actually sure why Clarence was here.  
    He didn’t really want to have this conversation with Nobody. But he didn’t have a choice, as the shadow wasn’t moving from where he sat. “She told me, back at the beginning, that she didn’t want to talk about the future.