Lions (10 page)

“She was trying to buy from me.”

“Buy what?”

“I won't sell to her. I won't even give it to her, dude.”

Gordon took the money and put it in Leigh's pocket.

“I didn't touch her, man,” Dex said. “Everyone knows she's yours. Not that I wouldn't want to. No offense.”

Gordon said nothing.

“I'm sorry about the other day. I'm sorry about your dad. My dad liked him. Whatever people say.”

On the way to Gordon's truck Leigh twisted out of his arm.

“I can walk fine,” she said, and tripped over an unlevel lip of sidewalk. Gordon gathered her up again and she let him. He opened the passenger door and buckled her in, and rolled down the window. She closed her eyes and leaned back. They drove out of town in silence. Once he pulled over for her to vomit. He walked her into the house and May stood and turned off the television.

“Oh Christ, Leigh,” she said. “Gordon, you OK?” She took Leigh on her arm and squeezed Gordon's hand.

Next door Georgianna was awake, still dressed, sitting in John's old chair, her hair down and all around her like a cobweb, an untouched shot glass full of whiskey on the table beside her. In the dim light, a faint line of hair across her upper lip.

“I keep looking for him,” she said. “I don't understand where he's gone.”

“Come on. Up to bed.”

“You know, don't you? You know where to find him.”

“No, Ma.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“I'd take you with me. Straight to him.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“Maybe in a few days.”

“It's hard to be here, isn't it?”

When she was asleep in his bed, he went outside and across the lawn into the shop. He left the lights off and walked slowly around the room. He could barely lift a hand to touch the old radio dial. The old coffee machine. He sat down beside the TIG thinking he would never move again. Didn't need to, didn't want to. He sat still, breathing calmly, then went into the back room for an old wool blanket, and unrolled it on the concrete floor and set his head in his arms.

In the days ahead Gordon was attentive to his mother and polite with May and Boyd. He fixed the diner dishwasher and he drove south of Burnsville with Boyd where they helped butcher a steer and brought the meat home wrapped and labeled for the freezer at the Lucy Graves. He helped the Jorgensens pack and separate what they would bring to North Dakota from what they would sell or donate to the Goodwill in Burnsville, and he filled the bed of his truck six times and drove there and back to make the donations himself, for which he was rewarded with fried chicken and frosted white cake. He was twice as quiet as usual.

Like his father.

In all the ways.

Kid his age.

Leigh won't put up with it long.

I think those two have busted up already.

Shame.

Better for her in the long run.

“You and Gordon have a lover's quarrel?” May asked late one afternoon. She handed Leigh a spray bottle of bleach and water.

Leigh walked out from behind the counter toward the empty tables. “He's not the same.”

Then May told her, as if Leigh didn't know, that Gordon's father had died. She looked at Leigh seriously, as if she were trying to communicate something gravely important, her pale blue eyes as steady as Leigh had ever seen them. “Leigh,” she said. “John Walker is gone.”

“I know,” Leigh said.

“Say it back to me.”

But Leigh wouldn't say it. In the first place, why? How stupid and embarrassing. And in the second place, that wasn't how they talked.

Gordon was particularly kind to Emery and Marybeth Sharpe, and Leigh noticed it was somewhat odd that she should pair Gordon with these two. Gordon and Emery in the Sterlings' front yard, the only time Leigh ever saw Gordon play ball, Emery's wild throw fast enough to knock the teeth out of your head. Marybeth coming into the diner with a crooked old finger pointed up and a faded postcard in her hand to show Gordon.

Another day, May put a scoop of ice cream in a dish for Gordon, and Leigh watched him carry it to Marybeth and squat down on the sidewalk beside her rocking chair. Gordon had come in and out of the diner without speaking to Leigh. Outside, he squinted in the sunlight and smiled up at Marybeth.

Leigh looked out across the street from behind the lunch counter as the two sat quiet on the sidewalk in the blasting heat. “What do you think those two talk about?” Boyd asked her, handing her his empty coffee cup for a refill.

Leigh shrugged. She took the mug and filled it from the half pot behind her.

Boyd nodded. “She's an odd one.”

“So is he.”

“More and more,” he said.

“Do you get the sense he's being so nice to everyone to make a point?”

“What point would that be?”

“Something about me.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I don't think so.”

Outside Marybeth touched Gordon's arm with her palsied hand, and wrapped her fingers around it. The blue irises in her eyes seemed to be dissolving into their whites, and her hairline was every year receding farther back from her spotted pink forehead. “You never go to church on Sundays,” she said.

He laughed lightly. “Can't say I do.”

“Your father never did.”

“No.”

“He traded all he had in this world for the three kingdoms.” She opened her trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. “The one, the two, and the three.”

Gordon looked up the street to a small tornado of dust. “Which three are those, Marybeth?”

In response she gripped his arm tighter. The ice cream was melting into a bright pink soup in the little white dish. “Gordon,” she said, “you are such a good boy.”

“Oh, I don't know about that.”

“I do. There's some of us that do.”

“OK.”

At dawn in his mother's kitchen the following day he filled a paper grocery bag with canned goods, the labels bright and cheerful: ranchero beans; cling peaches in heavy syrup; chicken and dumpling soup; beans and canned spaghetti. He took a flat can of sardines, and a plastic-wrapped roll of paper towels, and a sack of red apples. From his closet he took a wool blanket, his old G.I. Joe sleeping bag. From his father's bookshelf, he took a dozen old cowboy books, an illustrated copy of
Aesop's Fables,
and a world atlas. When he stepped outside in his blue jeans, the sky was still a soft black. He started the truck and took the narrow county road up north.

Nothing like raising crops on the high plains, Jorgensen used to say, for the spiritual workout of reconciling what you'd expected with what you ended up getting. The place was uninhabitable, too hard, too dusty, too dry, too poor, out of jobs, out of prospects. The wonder was that they had all stayed so long. For years, like a slowly lifting line of birds there'd been a steady, gradual flight out of town. Finally, in this single summer, all but eleven people would go. One at a time in the old brick stores and painted houses the windows were boarded or punched out with stones, eyes blind to a place so many had years ago shed so much blood to claim.

Not until now did the hangers-on allow themselves to consider the real possibility of larger, cleaner houses, of rooms filled with light, of backyard gardens that grew more than bitter turnips, bitter greens, and woody radishes. If the minutes and hours of the day were meant to be filled with industry and improvement, if people were meant by their own toil to increase the abundance with which they'd been blessed, and if indeed God helped those who helped themselves, then life was not meant to be lived in Lions. They ticked it off on their fingers. The drought and heat and emptiness were not so life-threatening as they'd been generations ago, but were still discomforts they had no real cause to endure. They'd been driving to Burnsville for school, for church, and for groceries for years. They cared little or nothing for this land, which rendered them nothing. From within their small, dusty houses they made plans. They talked it over with each other. They called their banks. They called the real estate agents or a schoolteacher or a bartender they knew and made plans for a new life in Burnsville. It was like laying up treasure in heaven. So did most everyone remaining in town come to see themselves at the center of a story of redemption. Somehow the country had been lost to them, and now they would reclaim it. Chuck Garcia, who had chosen Lions as his home base in the county for its quiet and expansiveness, was amazed by this sudden activity and ­conviction—even in his own house.

“We can't stay,” his wife said, looking back over her shoulder, holding a folded, coffee-stained doily. “You know we can't.”

“Why can't we?”

“Besides. It's Burnsville.”

“Since when is Burnsville everybody's answer to everything?”

“There's actually stuff to do there, for one.”

“Things to spend money on.”

“And so what? Anyway I want a garden.”

“You want a garden. It's only forty miles away, Emily. It's the same altitude. Maybe a little higher. The same dirt. You think it'll be so different?”

“Yes,” she said, and resumed folding napkins and sheets. “Edie knows a woman who has three raised beds in her backyard and feeds her family off that all summer. Tomatoes, squash, eggplant. Gets lettuce straight through October.”

“What does she water all that with?”

“In Burnsville they have the reservoir.”

Life there would be a lot like life in heaven. A number of saved among them were being transported to a newer, better place where everyone would conduct themselves more honorably and get along with each other and in general be much more satisified. Time moved chronologically in accordance with the unfolding of a divine plan. All of this felt right. Leaving felt right.

“Jesus tells you to leave your house and your home,” their minister reminded them in Burnsville. “These are his words, my friend. Not mine. ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead,' he says.

“Do not be bound together with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? We've all heard about the man in Lions this summer. Not a coincidence, my friends, but a calling out from the Lord Himself to which we are compelled to respond. Do not hesitate to find and protect your own sacred space from evil. Easy? Of course not. Are you attached to the world? Are you attached to the little things and ways of your life? Because it is not the things of this world we are after, my friends, it is heaven we are after. The Kingdom of God.

“And I know, I know,” the minister said, his thick hand raised in the air, the overhead light flashing for a moment on his spectacles. “You may ask, where am I supposed to go? Well, I'll tell you. You know we were fund-raising together for six long years. Six long years and we raised the money to build this wonderful place, our home. We picked out these chairs. This carpet. You women baked bread and cookies. You men went door-to-door. You made phone calls. We built this place together. Didn't we?”

They had.

They nodded.

“‘Come out from among them and be separate,' the Lord says. There is one path to salvation, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And here, here in this house, this is where you will find him. Follow Him when he moves you, and I promise you. I promise you. You will be blessed. You will be so blessed.”

None of the old folks from the Evening Primrose old folks' home who'd been sickened by the water ever came back to town, but those twenty-odd others who had not been sickened left, too. By mid-July the place was closed up for good. Four of Lions' six children returned from the clinic for the duration of the summer, while their parents found houses or apartments in Burnsville or Denver or Cheyenne or, in one case, back in Nebraska, and—in another case—to family in Iowa. The bank foreclosed on nineteen properties and a ranching/gas-line development company out of Greeley bought up a dozen more for cash, including the nursing home and all its structures. Over the years “For Sale” signs swung and bleached in the sun and wind until the houses were stripped and looted and eventually became safety hazards and were fenced in with chain-link.

If, once they had all gone and settled into their new apartments and condominiums in Burnsville, they were at all nostalgic, it was for a Lions that had never existed. They'd sometimes reminisce, saying the nights there had been uniformly cool and the days full of sunshine. Sugar beets and root vegetables grew as big as your head. The rooms of the schools and even the library were turned into storage rooms overflowing with grain. The name of the place, they said, came from a time when mountain lions roamed the prairie, and there's a big blond head of one of those lions—a giant male with green eyes—still mounted inside the bar that closed down years after they left. If you peer in the soaped-up windows, you can see him looking out at you.

Goodbyes didn't come singly, or one at a time, and more often than not you were lucky if you even knew you were in the midst of one. May Ransom believed—and not only for the older folks' sake—that if you had the opportunity, the ceremony of a farewell was worth it. So they said the free meal in the diner was for the Jorgensens, even though it was for everyone. Annie, Dock, and Emery came into the diner for pancakes, and to help prepare the food and decorations. Annie tied on an apron after she ate and came behind the counter to help cook. Fried chicken, country potatoes, butter beans and boiled spinach, and iced chocolate cake. Boyd was to roll a keg of Coors banquet beer over from across the street, brought in special order on the previous week's truck delivery, and anyone left in town who wanted to send off themselves or the Jorgensens, oldest of old-timers, was welcome.

May was measuring and sifting cake flour, a fine white dust floating about her chest and arms.

“I don't know how I let you talk me into living here in the first place,” Boyd said.

“It wasn't talk,” May looked up. “If you recall.”

Annie laughed. Emery watched his mother's mouth, then moved his own in silent imitation.

“Leigh, are you going to get Georgie?”

She nodded.

Dock took a giant waxed box of produce and set it on the counter by the deep stainless steel sink. “Annie went over there yesterday and she was still in bed.”

“The woman's had a loss,” May said and lowered the beaters into the cake bowl. “They were married thirty-five years.”

“He was gone up north or working in that shop at least fifteen of those years,” Boyd said.

May shot him a look. “Don't you get everybody started.”

He raised his hands. “I leave people to their own imaginations.”

“Like hell you do.”

May ran a stalk of celery under the faucet and shook it over the sink, the tiny beads of water lit up in the sun shining through the windows. Emery stared at it from the booth where he sat with his mother, then called out. With both hands he held up one of his green apple slices, transparent in the sunlight, and the door opened and in came Gordon with a bag of streamers and balloons, his skin scrubbed red with wind and sun, the bones in his face sharp and angular, dark circles around his eyes, and a radiance behind them. They all grew quiet. Emery jumped up and ran across the room and took Gordon's hand, and the two young men hugged. Gordon reached into his pocket and took out a kazoo.

“God help us,” Boyd said.

He blew once on the kazoo and gave it to Emery, who cradled it and returned to the booth with his mother.

“Well,” Gordon said, looking at Leigh. His dark hair was tangled and starting to look shaggy. He came to the counter and set down the bag. “Not much of a party atmosphere in here.”

May crossed the diner, kissed Gordon's cheek, and hugged him. “We've missed you.” Three honks from Emery on his kazoo.

“Where'd you get that stuff?” Leigh asked. Six honks.

“Burnsville.” Two honks.

“You've been in Burnsville?” Four honks.

Annie put her hand over the kazoo. “OK, Emery,” she said.

“I told your mom I'd go,” Gordon said. “And I told her I'd be here.”

“That's a good man, Gordon,” Annie said. “Bring those balloons over here, will you? Blow one up for Emery.”

In the next two hours, Gordon blew up yellow and green balloons and scrubbed the kitchen and range behind the counter, and smiled and chatted with Annie and with Boyd about the heat and the Jorgensens' emigration out of a country they'd lived in longer than anyone, after the Walkers, and he taste-tested the butter beans for May, but he did not look at Leigh again, and she thought his smiles seemed thin, and that there were lines around his eyes where there hadn't been a month before.

Leigh gave her mother a look that Gordon saw.

“I'll go get her, May,” he said, and turned toward the door.

“I'll come too,” Leigh said.

“You don't have to,” he said.

“I'll come.”

“Gordon and Leigh,” May called out across the diner without looking up from the silverware she was rolling in paper napkins. “Go get Georgie.”

They climbed in the truck and from the diner to the frontage road did not speak.

“So you've been in Burnsville this whole time? A week?”

“No,” he said.

“Where then?”

“Up north.”

“Where do you stay?”

“I camp.”

“There's no little house up there?”

“Actually,” he said, watching the road, “there sort of is.”

“People are mad at you for going.”

He slowed and looked sideways at her. “Are they?”

“Pretty mad.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You missed my birthday.”

Gordon was quiet.

“Maybe you should quit going up there,” Leigh said.

“Maybe I should.”

“Unless it's really important. Unless you're like”—she made a strange gesture with her hands—“going to visit Boggs or something.”

He watched her hands settle in her lap.

“You're not,” she said. “Are you?”

“Leigh,” he said.

“Why do you keep going?”

“If I told you I went up there just to be alone, would you believe me?”

“Why would you do that?”

He glanced at her.

“Well?”

He was quiet a few moments. “Would you believe me?”

“If you wanted me to.”

“OK, then. I go up there just to be alone.”

“Where your dad used to go?”

He kept his eyes on the road. “Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

So he told her about it. How it seemed despite the speed and wheels turning against the pavement as he drove, there was no movement at all. How big it all was. Insofar as Lions was a place of air and light and rock, he was not so much driving out of town as he was driving deeper into it, beneath it, say, or within it. It felt like a dropping down, not a driving away.

“It's so quiet,” he told her, “so empty. Everything you thought was important disappears.” He held his fingertips lightly together, then burst them open, fingers spread wide. “Just like that.”

She looked at him skeptically. “Everything like what disappears?”

“All the plans. Making something of yourself.”

She looked out the window.

“Is that so crazy?” he asked.

She shrugged. She got that feeling of emptiness in the middle of Lions, every day, and you could have called it despair, or panic, or desperation to get out, but you couldn't call it a good or wholesome thing. And you didn't need to drive up north to find it.

“I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Leigh.”

She kept her gaze pointed out the window. “You didn't hurt my feelings.”

“Tell me what's been happening around here.” He squeezed her hand, and the contact between them dissolved some of the tension. She moved closer to him in the front seat, yet not quite to where she'd used to sit, in the middle.

“You know about that man in the water tower?”

Gordon nodded.

“I saw him. I went with Boyd and he followed Chuck and the firetruck.”

“They shouldn't have let you.”

“I didn't want to mention it at the funeral. But I can't get his face out of my head.”

“I'm sorry.” He reached across her shoulder and pulled her in close. Kissed the crown of her head.

She counted off the names of everyone she could remember who'd left, or was planning to leave. “And none of them even saw him.”

“Does my mom know about everyone going?”

“It's sort of hard to tell,” she said, and he nodded. “Do you think she'll stay?”

“Yes.”

That night she dreamt of a lion.

It was late in the day, and warm. Around her feet, little yellow cup-shaped flowers. Gordon just before her. The red factory bricks behind them flushed with rosy light, and the windows of their houses and John Walker's truck in the driveway in the distance blinking with reflected gold.

She was digging for treasure while Gordon studied the horizon. Suddenly his face flattened. His gaze was fixed behind her and she turned slowly, filled with dread, until she saw it, too: a massive lion, fifty yards off, in the grass and weeds. Full mane. Each paw the size of her head. Eyes of fire. She could smell its gamey breath. The blood in her veins went hot and she froze.

It took her breath away. She couldn't call out and she couldn't move. The lion's eyes looked at her the way all the eyes of all the birds and stray dogs and cats and wild creatures she'd ever seen had looked at her, as if with the same pair of eyes.

I didn't think there were really lions here, she somehow finally communicated without speaking, and dropped her spade.

Then she understood that it hadn't come for her. Perhaps it hadn't even come at all. Perhaps it had been here all that time, for Gordon.

“It's true,” Gordon said, as his face was slowly erased. “It follows me everywhere now.”